Advestigo's product line consists of products and services based on their content recognition technology. Their AdvestiCHECK and AdvestiGUARD product offerings, in particular, apply this content recognition technology to both stored and E-mailed data; filtering content and alerting personnel to the presence of either structured (credit card numbers, etc.) or unstructured sensitive data on servers, workstations, or in-transit in E-mails.

Called "Theraography," the vendor's content recognition technology seeks to identify a file by generating a "fingerprint" based on the actual contents of the file. This fingerprint is created in different ways depending on the type of file being scanned--i.e., text, video, audio, etc.--however the vendor states that the fingerprint itself can be stored in a database using a common representation. If a single file contains multiple types of content (both video and text, for example) then multiple fingerprints are stored.

A key feature of the generated fingerprints is that they are based on the actual content of the files, and not the file type. Thus the technology can recognize duplicated content even if it is encoded via a different means (a jpg that was originally coded as a gif, for example). According to the vendor, this technology allows for the recognition of fingerprinted data even if it has been modified (copy and pasted into other documents, format changes, additions and deletions, etc.). The technology can recognize all or parts of the fingerprinted contents by looking for any single point of similarity in the content; where similarities are defined as the existence of common characteristics. The content recognition process therefore involves generating the fingerprint of the original document and then comparing it to the fingerprints of the suspect documents. The vendor states that fingerprints can be applied to any digital content, including pre-existing documents.

The two primary product offerings in Advestigo's stable are AdvestiCHECK and AdvestiGUARD.

Available now, AdvestiCHECK allows for the scanning and identification of sensitive data that may be stored on networks (FTP Servers, SAN, NAS) or workstations. The vendor states that AdvestiCHECK is a continuous and automated system, and that it is "...currently able to search most Office document formats (text and graphics) and source code."

AdvestiGUARD is currently in beta (general availability is expected by the end of the year), and will provide the ability to scan and filter E-mail messages (body text and attachments) leaving the company. According to the vendor, scanning Instant Messages or HTTP traffic are future planned enhancements.

Contact Advestigo for further information.