The police force in England’s second-largest city, the Greater Manchester Police (GMP), has suffered extensive disruption for several days following an infection by the Conficker worm.
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A new series of licensed Star Wars character USB flash drives is now available.  The set of drives, which includes replicas of Darth Vader, Boba Fett, Imperial Stormtrooper and Yoda, are supplied in capacities from 4GB to 16GB.

While they offer sufficient storage for a huge amount of data – possibly enough even for the blueprints of the Death Star – they don’t offer any on-board protection for that data, if the drive should get lost or stolen. Read More »

Every once in a while, someone launches a USB flash drive that we just have to blog about.  Here’s a striking one that I haven’t seen before:  a scented pendant with internal USB drive. 

If you carry your flash drive as a necklace, I guess it’s fairly secure – or at least, you’ll quickly realise if you lost it.  But adding a scent to the drive is certainly an unusual step.  I wonder what it smells of?

Of course, our secure USB flash drives have no artificial scents applied to them.  But they do keep your data safe in all circumstances – which will leave your organisation smelling of roses if one of our drives is ever misplaced or stolen.

A UK local council has just found the true cost of a virus infection which was introduced onto its network by an employee plugging an infected memory stick into his computer in May this year.

The overall bill for IT recovery and lost revenues was over £500,000 (more than $800,000), as systems were disrupted for several days.

The report on the outbreak from Ealing Council in West London states: ‘At the point the memory stick was plugged in the virus attacked the host PC.  It blocked connections to anti-virus and Microsoft Support websites and attempted to establish connections with 500 internet sites chosen at random from a selection of 25,000 seeking instructions from its author, and sought to also contact other similarly infected PCs that it could find. It then started propagating itself across the Ealing network.’

Although the virus has not been named, it obviously exploited the well-known Windows Autorun vulnerability to spread on the Council network. 

This could have been prevented by issuing all council employees with a secure USB flash drive with onboard anti-virus scanning – which would not only keep mobile data secured, but would also stop any infections using thumb drives to spread.

You can read more about this incident in the following articles:
 
www.theregister.co.uk/ealing_council_mystery_malware
 
www.scmagazineuk.com/Ealing-Council-facing-501000-fine-after-its-network-was-hit-by-a-virus-that-crippled-it-for-weeks
 
www.publicservice.co.uk/news_story

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.

Following last Friday’s announcement by President Obama of his plan to stop cyberthreats, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would introduce a Barack Obama USB drive.

And here it is.  The 2GB USB drive has a hologram of Obama’s face on its front cover, with the drive rotating out from the side.  The drive is also pre-loaded with some of President Obama’s most famous speeches, including his inaugural address. 

Unfortunately, despite his recent address about national data security, the drive is not encrypted

It looks like USB flash drives are becoming a popular vector for spreading malware.  A 4 year old worm has been reactivated and is now spreading through the use of thumb drives, according to Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center (MMPC).

According to the MMPC, the ‘Neeris’ worm is copying some of the infection strategies of Conficker.  The timing of its reappearance is also unusual, as it appeared a day before Conficker’s ‘activation’ date of 1st April.

Neeris’ makers have recently added an exploit for the MS08-067 vulnerability that Microsoft patched in October last year.  Conficker also exploits this vulnerability and became one of the biggest malware outbreaks ever, early in 2009. 

Although Neeris is not yet widespread, and its purpose and effect seems to be relatively benign at this point, it’s worth making sure that all systems are patched against the MS08-067 vulnerability, as detailed in the link above.