MORE UK DATA LOST ANOTHER REASON TO USE THE STORAGESTICK

UK prisoner data lost by external consultant on an unsecured USB stick

London, United Kingdom - Just four days after a Government statement on the full extent of data losses over the last twelve months the details of 84,000 UK prisoners have been lost on an unsecured USB drive by a third party consultant.

Its the latest loss in what has been called a torrent of data loss by the UK government and its contractors. The amazing thing is that in so many cases these are top flight consultancy organizations who advise corporates on auditing and security policy who don't appear to practice what they preach.

The latest incident this week serves to underscore that data security is a key issue but that the use of traditional USB sticks is not an option. The key problem is that the majority of USB drives, encrypted or not, are merely a 'dumb storage' device, that is, they have no awareness of their environment they simply unlock and lock as requested.

"The StorageStick from Accario has a unique solution where it can enhance its secure storage with the use of end point scanning technology." said David Coombes, CTO for Accario, "This is similar in concept to NAC from Cisco but instead of being used by a computer connecting to a network, we use it to allow the StorageStick to scan the machine it has been plugged into and make a decision about whether to unlock based on the result of those scans."

"As further security the StorageStick is secured with the option of a password and a biometric fingerprint swipe before it can be unlocked." Coombes continued, "Finally the device is centrally managed so that if it becomes lost or compromised then it can be disabled by the Management Suite the next time it connects to the internet."

According to Accario the challenge is that people look at data and treat it as if encryption is a magic bullet to solve all the problems, but they contend, that unless you have awareness of the environment that you are letting your data into how do you know the machine isn't compromised? Ultimately all you could end up with is a really secure virus if you open data on a compromised machine.

"I probably share the frustration of a lot of other people," said Brian DaBinett, CEO of Accario, "We're all human and things happen, the important thing is that is if your dealing with sensitive data whether public or commercial why wouldn't you spend £40 ($80) on securing that data?"