Kingston: portable USBs and the security issue

Vaughan Nankivell, regional manager A/NZ Kingston Technology said its initiative in releasing Mac OS support for DTVP is a significant achievement giving the Apple community an on-the-go storage solution.

For example, he said, how many teachers and students are handling valuable or sensitive pieces of information via USB flash drive.  

To be able to do these with secure USB flash drive with full support for Mac OS is extremely valuable he added.  

Users will have peace of mind and can relax knowing that the data is safely secured with hardware-level encryption and complex password support.

Nankivell believes that when USB devices grew in popularity, organisations were faced with managing these devices and as such, end-point management came to the forefront of IT security and has grown over the last few years. 

"The papers and online forums regularly provide real life examples of how this is becoming a common problem including a very recent example from a New Zealand consumer that discovered US military information stored on an iPod that was purchased second-hand on the internet," he said. 

"Organisations need to ensure that they have a permissions-based device management that will allow only "approved" devices onto a corporate network." 

He said a 'paradigm shift' has occurred where blacklisting is now no longer possible citing the management of virus signatures as an example. 

"Viruses are being released faster than the signatures can be updated from most antivirus companies," said Nankivel. 

"As such - you now see these vendors implementing a whitelist methodology instead of a blacklist.  

"This is now part of the design of successful approaches for data loss prevention." 

Kingston recently authored a whitepaper with Guardian Technologies that addresses data loss prevention and the best steps organisations can take to reduce the risk of data theft or leakages to maintain an acceptable level of security.

"The Apple Channel is growing and this is not only the home, small business owner, creative type or professional arts - these are business users and they work in all sorts of organisations, companies, educational and government bodies," he added.  

He said, until now, the focus for secure USB Flash Drives had been predominantly in the Enterprise Space which was dominated by PC's.  

Cross platform computing is also growing and a number of users move information between different systems - Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS.  

"Security concerns and responsible management of information is of equal importance to a user, regardless of hardware platform or operating system," he added.