Restrict sensitive document leakage from Printing, "Save as", Copying and Priting screen?

Question

Our President highly suspected some of our staff who have sold the confidential documents to competitors but we do not have enough proof. How can we restrict sensitive data leakage from Printing, "Save as", Copying and Priting screen?
Thank you for your advice in advance.

Answer 1

Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management can apply DRM to a PDF file, which prevents printing and content extraction, and links access to the document to a user login - but there is no way to prevent that user saving a copy of the file to disk or a USB drive, or making multiple copies, no from telling someone else their login details. You can revoke access remotely if you suspect a copy has been stolen, but there's no DRM solution for PDF files which can lock the content to a hardware platform, for example in the way a copy of Windows "activates" itself. Opening and copying a file are two entirely-different concepts, and if a LCDRM-encrypted file is published to the Web without the login details to open it, we can be absolutely certain it cannot be cracked as the encryption hashes used by Adobe are so complex they would take billions of years to break, even with government-level resources. Naturally if a user reveals their login details to someone, LiveCycle's audit trail will prove this and you can take legal action against that user, but they may not care if the document has sufficient value.
Using PDF there is no way to block access to the Print Screen button. Some third-party software converts the PDF into a proprietary file format which only opens in their own software, that in turn attempts to block the print screen keystroke, but it's not hack-proof and the resulting file is of course no longer a PDF. Ultimately if you can see something on screen you can always copy it, either by use of a custom display driver, remote-desktop system or photographing the screen with a cellphone camera, and re-OCRing the pages from those photos.
Where documents are sufficiently-important to require a guarantee that on-screen reading is the only possible thing a user can do once the file is opened, they should be restricted to using hardware in secured locations, where network access, printers, USB ports etc. can all be removed. This is the approach taken by many enterprise and public-sector agencies; but once a document is distributed to an unregulated location there will always be a way around copy protection on page content if a user can open the file and view it on screen. While there are some interactive page elements in PDF which are harder to "screen scrape" than others (SWF, video and 3D), it can be done. The only elements of a PDF file which can be guaranteed secure even in an unsecure location are invisible features such as scripts when the PDF is protected using LCDRM to ensure it cannot be opened in third-party software.