Customers or enterprises have a large amount of sensitive data assets. Leaks of the sensitive data assets can lead to significant financial losses. Data Management (DMS) allows you to use digital watermarks to resolve the preceding issue. You can add visible and invisible watermarks on web pages to enhance data security. This feature is supported by the security team and policy team of Alibaba Cloud and provides high security and robustness.

Prerequisites

You are a DMS administrator.

Overview

Digital watermarks are typically used to protect copyright, prevent data leaks, raise the security awareness of employees, and warn of risks.

After you enable digital watermarks, DMS adds visible and invisible watermarks on the GUI of the DMS console to ensure data security.
  • Visible watermarks: the watermarks that appear on the medium where data is provided. By default, visible watermarks are identical and light-colored texts with a diagonal layout. For example, for web pages on the corporate intranet, the text of each visible watermark can be the name and ID of the current employee who is viewing the web pages. For documents that are externally provided, the text of each visible watermark can be the signature of an enterprise.
    In DMS, each visible watermark consists of a username and a four-digit ID that is randomly generated, as shown in the following figure. An example of visible watermarks
  • Invisible watermarks: the watermarks that are hidden inside the medium where data is provided. These watermarks are developed by the security team of Alibaba Cloud. You can use invisible watermarks in scenarios such as data leak tracing.

    If you want to use invisible watermarks to trace data leaks, contact the support group for help.

Enable digital watermarks

  1. Log on to the DMS console V5.0.
  2. Find the configuration item for digital watermarks and click Change in the Actions column.
  3. In the Change Parameter Configuration dialog box, turn on Value.
    Note If you turn on Value, digital watermarks are enabled. If you turn off Value, digital watermarks are disabled.
  4. Click Confirm Change.
    After the setting is complete, refresh the page. It takes about 30s for the setting to take effect.

Data leak tracing and accountability

A data leak occurs and the leaked data contains visible watermarks. In this case, to find the user who is responsible for the data leak, you can use the text of each visible watermark to search for the user on the Users page of the DMS console. For more information, see Manage users.