01732 759725
SECURITY
32
Restricted view
The market for privacy filters is booming. Dave Williams, 3M Business Manager,
UK Electronics Market, explains why this is good news for IT resellers
Experiment results
Worldwide, 91% of visual hacking attempts
were successful. In approximately half
of cases the material was taken in 15
minutes or less, and in only around
one third of attempts was the ‘hacker’
challenged.
Over half (52%) of sensitive information
obtained in the experiment was from
electronic screens of one sort or another.
The UK fared slightly better than some
countries, with a success rate of just 44%,
but that can hardly be considered a ‘good’
result.
Not all departments were equally
vulnerable. The office functions easiest to
hack were sales, customer services and
communications, followed by accounting
and finance and human resources.
The most secure departments were Legal,
closely followed by Quality Assurance and
R&D, perhaps because personnel in these
functions are more aware of the sensitive
nature of the information they handle.
A growing risk
The growth of open-plan offices and mobile
working has increased the risk of visual
hacking, as today many people have a
desktop monitor, a laptop, a tablet and a
smartphone, creating four areas of security
vulnerability.
There are, however, things businesses
can do to reduce the risk, including
clean desk policies; routine shredding of
documents; the use of automated log-ins;
and screen savers that activate after a
short period of time. When visual privacy
measures were put in place, the number of
successful hacks dropped by 26%.
Employee education can also make
a difference, by making staff aware that
they have a responsibility to prevent their
screens being viewed, for example by
angling screens away from casual onlookers
when working in a public place or an open-
plan office that visitors or contractors walk
through on a regular basis.
A more robust solution
One drawback of these methods is that
they rely on the user taking responsibility,
which is why more organisations are
adopting privacy filters as another line of
defence.
A fast, simple and relatively economic
way to immediately reduce the visual
hacking risk, these film-based devices
can be slipped on and off a variety of
screens, ranging from desktop monitors to
smartphones. When in place, they ensure
that on-screen information can only be
viewed at very close range and head on,
effectively making screen content invisible
to shoulder-surfers or people on either side.
For resellers, privacy filters are an easy
addition to an existing security product or
office accessories portfolio. Compared to
security information and event management
(SIEM) software, for example, installing a
few hundred visual privacy filters is very
straightforward. And demand is growing;
over the last 12 months, the UK IT channel
reseller market for 3M Privacy Filters has
seen double-digit volume growth.
Visual hacking is just one element of
a much bigger security picture, but since
it is so simple for both users and resellers
to implement, it surely makes sense for
organisations to address this potential
weakness before a hacker makes off with
confidential or sensitive data.
Let’s start with some questions: where
are you reading this article?; can anyone
view it over your shoulder?; and, while
this article is obviously not sensitive
data, what if it was?
Or, for a different viewpoint, have you
ever been in a situation – in public or in the
office – where you have inadvertently seen
something interesting on a screen that was
confidential or, at least, not for your eyes?
Imagine what a third party might be
able to do with that information and it is
easy to understand why there
is growing concern about
the risk posed by the use of
screens in public or shared
spaces.
Visual hacking is one of
the fastest emerging areas
of security prevention, and
solutions to prevent it are
something that technology
resellers are increasingly
adding to their product
portfolios.
White hat hackers
Before we look at that opportunity, it makes
sense to explain the visual hacking risk
in more detail. A good starting point is a
recent 3M-sponsored experiment by the
Ponemon Institute, involving 157 ‘trials’
in a variety of organisations across eight
countries in which ‘white hat’ hackers
posing as temporary office workers with
visible, valid security badges attempted to
obtain sensitive or confidential data.
They tried to do this in three ways:
by walking through the office looking for
information on desks, monitor screens,
printers, copiers and in other open
locations; by taking a stack of business
documents, labelled confidential, from a
desk and placing it in a briefcase; and
by using a smartphone to take images of
paper or on-screen documents.
Sensitive content obtained during this
experiment included personal IDs, customer
and employee details, access and log-in
credentials, classified documents, attorney-
client privilege material and financial and
accounting information.
Dave Williams,
3M
Business Manager,
UK Electronics Market
To request a free sample or for more information about 3M
Privacy Filters, please visit:
