NASA is the latest organisation to clearly outline its policies on use of non-authorised USB flash drives and other removable media.
NASA CIO Jonathan Pettus issued a memo last week, instructing employees in good practice with removable storage. He stated they should not use personally-owned USB drives on government computers; nor use government-owned removable media devices on personal machines or machines that don’t belong to the agency; not to put unknown devices into ANY systems; and to ensure systems are fully patched and updated.
Here’s an interesting experiment that was done by a security consultant and writer for the US online security portal, Dark Reading back in summer 2006.
The experiment looked at if a company’s employees would try to see what data was on an unsecured USB flash drive that they found in their company car park.
Do you really know how many people are using USB flash drives in your organisation? Don’t worry if you’re not sure - a majority of IT professionals are equally uncertain.
Our April 2008 survey found that 77% of corporate end users had used personal USB flash drives for work purposes. Yet IT managers estimated that just 35% of their workforce used personal drives. So how do you bridge that security gap, and protect the sensitive business data on flash drives? Here are our top 10 tips.
Last week, Wired began reporting that the US Army has banned the use of USB drives after a worm that spreads by copying itself to thumb drives or other removable media infiltrated Army networks.
It’s not the first time malware has been spread through this vector. In May, 2007 the SillyFD-AA worm spread by copying itself onto removable media such as USB flash drives, then automatically running when that drive was connected to a PC. The following month, the LiarVB-A worm surfaced. Like the SillyFD-AA worm, it too spread by copying itself onto removable drives such as USB flash drives and running as soon as the device connected to a PC.
And more recently, in August 2008, NASA made headlines after the TGammima.AG worm infected a computer on the International Space Station. And how did it get there? Via a USB flash drive.
This SanDisk Enterprise secure USB drive video illustrates a realistic scene in today’s business world.
The video presents the advantage of using secure USB drives in combination with a smart management system in case of a USB drive lose.
As 21% of the company workers have little to no awareness about the risks involved with transporting corporate data on flash drives (SanDisk’s Survey, 2007), we believe this video can increase the awarence of risks when using unsecured USB Flash Drive.
last week, instructing employees in good practice with removable storage. He stated they should not use personally-owned USB drives on government computers; nor use government-owned removable media devices on personal machines or machines that don’t belong to the agency; not to put unknown devices into ANY systems; and to ensure systems are fully patched and updated.
