SOUTH KOREA COMPUTER AND DATA PROTECTION A SERIOUS BUSINESS AT CORPORATIONS Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea


Companies Get Serious about Protecting Information

After learning hard lessons on the importance of security, large companies are striving to protect their corporate secrets. Various gadgets have been introduced to prevent the leakage of confidential information and trace criminals when a leak occurs.

At Samsung Electronics, you can't print a document without approval through an internal network, virtually blocking visitors from outside from using printers. Not only that, PCs at Samsung Electronics are not your conventional, off-the-shelf models. Though equipped with CD and DVD players, they can only read data and cannot store it. Since 1999, the firm has used PCs without CD-writing functions.

Portable memory-cards which can be easily hidden and removed are also banned. And when replacing its old computers with new ones, the firm first removes the hard-disks and destroys them. With the emergence of technology that can restore data from "erased" hard-disks, the company is not taking chances.

SK Telecom is also working to protect its secrets. If a thief broke into the headquarters of SK Telecom and stole a laptop containing sensitive business data, he would be unable to get to the information. A security program inside the laptop immediately disables the computer once it is taken beyond a certain area. If SK employees want to use their corporate laptops outside the company, they must first get approval from the firm. Even then, a complex passcode must be entered properly in order to get the machines to work.

Some companies have even gone so far as to remove hard-disks from corporate PCs altogether, relying instead on so-called "security PCs" with extremely limited abilities. Workers at Hitachi, a Japanese electronics company, must access the internal network to read and store various documents and files. By controlling the data files in one location, the company is seeking to prevent important information from finding its way to insecure individual PCs. Hitachi calls its security PCs a fundamental solution to information security and is pitching them to other companies.

(englishnews@chosun.com )