An Amusing Use For DLP

Here's a valuable lesson for you college students out there, from Dave Meizlik: if your professor is married to one of the leads at a DLP vendor, think twice before plagiarizing a published dissertation.

We talked generally for a while about the problem and then it hit me what if I downloaded a bunch of relevant dissertations, fingerprinted them with a DLP solution, and then sent the girls dissertation through the systems analysis engine for comparison? Would the DLP solution be able to detect plagiarism? It almost seemed too simple. ... So when we got home from lunch I started up my laptop and RDP"d into my DLP system. I had my wife download a bunch of relevant dissertations from her school"s database, and within minutes I fingerprinted roughly 50 dissertation files, many of which were a couple hundred pages in length, and built a policy to block transmission of any of the data in those files. I then took her students dissertation and emailed it from a client station to my personal email. Now because the system was monitoring SMTP traffic it sent the email (with the student"s paper as an attachment) to the content analysis engine. I waited a second another and then I impatiently hit send receive and there it was, an automated notification telling me that my email had violated my new policy and had been blocked.

I suspect that's one grad student who's going to be serving fries soon...

—Rich