As you may have seen in the news, there’s a widespread email phishing scam going on that has so far affected over 30,000 users of Hotmail, Google and Yahoo’s web mail services.  Username and password details for these accounts were posted briefly online. 

But there’s also an underlying security issue that needs attention.  Many people often use one password for multiple online applications, such as their webmail, online banking and more.  Which means if a hacker can crack one password, they may have access to many other aspects of your online life.

So it’s worth having a different, and complex, password for every online application that you want to protect.  This is easy to do with our Usecure USB flash drives, as the user interface requires that you use a complex alphanumeric password (it also gives you a handy reminder, just in case you should forget).  But it’s good practice to not use that password again!

Following a question by a member of the UK parliament, UK Government departments have revealed the numbers of laptops lost or stolen recently.

The figures are quite startling, with well over 100 laptops lost or stolen in the past year alone.  One organisation – the Department for Work and Pensions – alone lost 41 laptops last year, from its fleet of around 9,700 machines. 

Although Government departments claim that all laptops are now required to be encrypted, that’s still an awful lot of data lost.  There is also the real risk that the data may not be protected

And don’t forget, these figures are just for laptops.  You have to wonder how many other devices – such as USB memory sticks – were lost in the same period, what data was on them, and whether that data was encrypted. 

Although some UK Public Sector organisations – such as the National Health Service – are leading the way in deploying secure USB flash drives to protect data on the move, not all Government organisations are at the same level.  Unfortunately there will be many more data breaches to come in the next year.

Missing or stolen USB flash drives have had a great deal of attention over the past two years.  But bigger drives can go astray too, and when they do, it can mean a truly massive data loss.

It was announced yesterday that a hard drive has been reported missing from the US National Archives, containing over 1 terabyte of sensitive data from the time of President Clinton’s administration.  Data includes the personal information of White House staff and visitors, logs of events, social gatherings, political records and more.

The drive was apparently stored in an unsecured work area, where National Archives employees were digitising information from the Clinton administration.  It’s estimated that over 100 staff had access to the area during the time period when the loss happened.  The FBI is now conducting a criminal investigation.

Mandatory hardware encryption – like that featured on our Cruzer Enterprise range of secure USB flash drives would have nullified the threat of such a loss.  As the old saying goes, the bigger they are, they harder they fall.  That applies to drive storage, too.