Preventing screenshot data leakage in new era of working from home

Author: Carly Weller

Netskope has announced newly-issued patents from the US Patent and Trademark Office, designed to protect data within image formats including JPG, PNG, and GIF. These inventions support organisations tackling regulatory compliance needs such as GDPR and LGPD, as well as protecting confidential corporate information by enabling granular and contextual data protection policies to be extended to image files.  

As organisations shifted toward a remote-first workstyle, confidential meetings over video conference have become a daily occurrence in business. Research by Forbes and Zoom found that 41% of survey respondents have at least 10 video conference business meetings per week, and these habits look set to continue beyond the global pandemic lockdown. In these meetings, sensitive and protected data is often displayed in employees’ homes through presentations and screensharing. Screenshotting such data is seen by many as an easy way to take notes, but it also creates a file which requires careful handling for compliance purposes.

Netskope’s data shows that at least 20% of traffic moving among enterprise web and cloud applications today is images. Images are ripe for data exfiltration, but they represent a security need in which legacy data loss prevention (DLP) solutions are limited, and in many cases, completely blind. 

Krishna Narayanswamy, CTO and co-founder, Netskope comments, “All of our patents are intended to prepare our customers for a cloud-first, SASE-centric future. No other company combines next-generation secure web gateway (SWG) capabilities, Zero Trust principles, advanced machine learning to detect unauthorised data exfiltration, and advanced threat protection – all delivered in a cloud-based platform atop NewEdge, the world’s largest, most performant, security private clouds. Our teams ensure that the best of our inventions support our customers on their digital transformation journeys, protecting data wherever and however it is accessed.”

Netskope’s new patents take the company’s patent tally to over 40, with more than 50 others still pending. The latest patents include innovations in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Loss Protection and access control, and include sophisticated processing in real-time without compromising user experience.