Patent ID: 9419998
Filing Date: 2016-08-16
CPC Classification: H04L,H04N

Claim Text:
1. A method comprising: capturing network traffic by a network security appliance associated with a protected network, wherein the network traffic is originated by a source external to the protected network and is directed to an intended recipient associated with the protected network; extracting, by the network security appliance, a media file from the network traffic; determining, by the network security appliance, presence of a potentially malicious hidden data item embedded in the media file in a form of encoded data within one or more of a digital watermark, steganography and a barcode by decoding the encoded data by a decoding module of the network security appliance; determining whether the decoded data violates one or more security policies of a plurality of security policies of the network appliance by applying a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) filter to the decoded data by a content inspection engine of the network security appliance; and when said determining whether the decoded data violates one or more security policies is affirmative, then protecting the intended recipient against the potentially malicious hidden data item by the network security appliance performing one or more of (i) blocking transmission of the media file to the intended recipient, (ii) causing the intended recipient to be alerted regarding the potentially malicious hidden data item and (iii) causing a network administrator of the protected network to be alerted regarding the potentially malicious hidden data item.