Beijing i-SEAL is an innovative enterprise that primarily focuses on providing Information Security solutions. Its services and solutions are applicable to a whole array of industries including financial sector, government, communications, education, energy and medical services. One of its flagship products is i-SEAL sensitive data protecting system. This product allows users to monitor, assess, and alert if any unauthorised system or user actions are being performed.

Challenge

HeBei Unicom, one of Beijing i-SEAL end clients, is a telecommunications operator, with over 5,000 employees. The company provides network access services and mobile services for 75 million people in Hebei province. Due to the nature of corporate public services, the enterprise’s core network terminals and servers contain private customer data. Ensuring the integrity and privacy of their client data is one of Hebei Unicom’s top priorities in a world where companies are regularly exposed to the data leakage.

For instance, in 2018 ransomware attacks against enterprises increased by 12% from the previous year1. Therefore, data security remains a pivotal issue for most businesses today.
Moreover, there are harder security challenges from so-called “in-house” attacks, whereby sensitive data is leaked by internal company employees through network terminals, USB disks, printers, shared directories and e-mails.

To combat such risks, it is common for companies to utilize different control methods, like firewall blocking, encryption, alarms and interceptions, Bejiing i-SEAL DLP system can facilitate this and detect the leaking sensitive content and prevent security breaches.
However, the type and format of the leaked content can present a challenge.

Solution

Before the implementation of ABBYY FineReader Engine, monitoring the leakage of information from unsearchable TIFFs and PDFs was done manually. After incidents of data loss or information misuse, the company’s security experts had to perform manual verification and examine various logs — a time-consuming process demanding a heavy workload from certain employees.

Moreover, i-SEAL business clients from industries such as finance and healthcare possess important personally identifiable information (PII), particularly Protected Health Information and payment card information. Loss of these sensitive data or inability to act in a timely manner can have dire repercussions for enterprises from those sectors.

Employees of such companies frequently access personal records during daily work. To ensure exceptional protection of customer sensitive data, enterprise security management needs to use solutions providing exceptional data leakage prevention (DLP) systems. An effective DLP system is impossible without advanced classification and recognition technology, which allows to supervise and protect the leakage of information collected by internal employees through capturing screenshots and image files.

This is not without its own technical challenges: while ordinary document content is relatively easy to analyze and identify, text and image recognition in pictures and scans is limited by performance and cannot be efficiently and accurately checked. Hence, using reliable and accurate OCR becomes inevitable, as Beijing i-SEAL keeps up to the highest standards of information security.

After a thorough assessment, demonstration and stress testing of the capabilities of ABBYY FineReader Engine, Beijing i-SEAL chose the technology as their classification and recognition engine due to its high level of OCR accuracy in comparison to other OCR vendors. Beijing i-SEAL’s use of ABBYY FineReader Engine was adapted to process unsearchable documents in both Chinese Simplified and English.

Result

After the implementation of ABBYY FineReader Engine, it has become possible to monitor certain types of information leakage in real time. This in turn allows for the intervention and data analysis to be performed almost instantaneously. The need for security personnel to do lengthy manual verification and inspection of data every day has been eliminated. In the framework of the project, Beijing i-SEAL system can process up to 400,000 pages per year, while keeping up the high standards of private data security. For the enterprise, prevention of data breaches remains the top priority, and integration of ABBYY FineReader Engine can ensure that the i-SEAL DLP system is beyond reproach.