Career Education Corp., which operates 80 postsecondary schools in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, has begun deploying data-leak-prevention technologies to protect sensitive student information, becoming one of the first in the education realm known to be using “extrusion detection.”

Extrusion detection involves monitoring content to detect or sometimes block unauthorized transmissions of sensitive information. It’s no surprise these days when financial-services or insurance firms adopt data-leak-prevention methods. But Career Education’s move to roll out data-inspection gear — in this case, Vontu’s — to check that student information isn’t sent out inadvertently over the Internet underscores how privacy concerns are affecting diverse organizations.

The content monitoring “is part of our privacy initiative,” says Michael Gabriel, CISO at the Hoffmann Estates, Ill.-based Career Education -- the publicly traded company that owns the Katherine Gibbs schools, culinary school Le Cordon Bleu North America, Colorado Technology University and others, which about 95,000 students attend.

In a project recently undertaken with its U.S. schools, Career Education’s IT division has begun deploying Vontu’s extrusion-detection system to monitor outbound e-mail and files.

The extrusion-detection equipment flags unauthorized transmissions of information, such as Social Security numbers or other sensitive details that might be found in student records.

In the past, with monitoring, Gabriel says, the amount of Social Security numbers that might inadvertently flow out “was huge.”

“Just yesterday we had someone sending out e-mail that was not authorized by sending a spreadsheet that had hidden columns that she didn’t even know about,” Gabriel says.

The e-mail was blocked when Career Education’s IronPort mail filter, checking for authorized routes, blocked the e-mail and sent it to the Vontu equipment, which checked the e-mail for sensitive information and determined whether it should be encrypted by the PGP Universal Encryption Gateway that’s installed.

The unauthorized e-mail in this instance was quarantined in a mailbox for review by business managers.

Attempts at unauthorized transmissions usually are simply mistakes by staff, Gabriel says. To lessen use of Social Security numbers in general, Career Education has stopped using them to identify students and switched to a separate student ID number.