Last updated on June 26th, 2023 at 12:07 pm
INTRODUCTION
A virtual data room is a safe online repository that businesses use for safe electronic document storage. VDRs provide cost-effective, reliable, safe and high-volume storage, sharing, distribution of sensitive business documents. They are also used by companies to maintain compliance requirements related to securities laws. In today’s times it has become a basic necessity for organizations that have to deal with third parties daily. But this increase in the volume of online working has also brought on an increased threat of cyber-attack.
Physical Storage – VDR
Even highly secured physical storage rooms or highly secured email servers can be targeted or breached due to negligence of users and are susceptible to camera-based attacks. Such stolen data is then sold or distributed due to its sensitive nature. To combat this issue and offer higher security while sharing documents VDRs offer a host of security features that prevent unsolicited viewing and trace potential culprits.
At the most basic level VDR use access control and permissions to determine the recipient and what he does with the document. This could be like restricting the recipient from viewing or printing certain pages, restricting downloading of documents, or ensuring that the documents cannot be physically or digitally distributed by issuing single-access password or key.
Camera based attackers try to circumvent this by using a camera or the screenshot option of a laptop to create a duplicate image or copy the document. VDRs use special features like fence view and digital watermarking which focus on both forestalling and disincentivizing data breach. Fence view is a preventive security feature that obscures majority of the document so that it is unreadable, but leaves a small window that can be moved to read the content. While this does not completely prevent camera-based attack, but makes it very inconvenient for the potential attacker.
Digital watermarking is a feature that automatically embeds certain information into each and every page that is viewed or downloaded from the VDR. This contains name of the person, IP address and location of the viewer so that in case of a breach, the source can be easily identified. Besides there are additional tools like document expiry that help VDRs protect your documents.
The Confiex team specializes in providing premium virtual data room solutions tailored for businesses. With their vast experience in working with document sharing platforms, they have been actively supporting the Virtual Data Room community since 2015 by offering valuable information to users free of charge.