Trend Micro recently held the local launch of LeakProof 3.0, its latest anti-virus product for the corporate market – the result of its acquisition of Provilla.

Trend Micro Malaysia’s principal consultant Victor Lo said the solution addresses the evolving online threats faced by corporations on a daily basis.

“Traditionally, anti-virus software are designed to protect users against malicious codes. However, with corporate espionage being rampant, an answer was needed to protect against malicious user behaviours.

“Corporate e-mail, USB (universal serial bus) flash drives, free Internet Web mail, Wi-Fi, CD/DVD writers, handheld devices, Bluetooth, infra-red and even the printer are some of the threats of data leakage from the corporate environment.

“How would a company know when an employee at the local Starbucks connecting to the company’s network via a wireless virtual private network is editing a confidential document and e-mailing it to a competitor via Gmail. If they knew, could the act have been stopped?

How about an employee at a branch office encrypting customer data and copying it to his flash drive? Could it have been monitored?” Lo asked.

Depending on the company’s policy, Trend Micro claims that LeakProof can stop users before they are even able to even zip up that fingerprinted Excel spreadsheet, or have it copied to a USB flash drive for that matter.

“The ‘fingerprinted’ files are no bigger than normal files as the ‘fingerprints’ add only about 64 bytes to one kilobyte to the overall file size regardless of how many pages or how big the file is. And they are stored on a central server as a means of tracking the fingerprinted files,” Lo said.

But as with most technology, LeakProof 3.0 – while reacting well to the tried-and-true ways of copying and pasting – still does not prevent users from retyping from a document, be it a line or a paragraph. And while it can detect zipped files, it can’t do anything to password-protected or encrypted files.

More information on LeakProof 3.0 can be found at Trend Micro’s Provilla subsidiary and will be available through select Trend Micro global sales channels beginning this month. For details, visit www.provilla-inc.com.