Searching for Utopia

I used to be Eminem’s fan, you know what I’m saying. My how he has lots of things to tell us concerning English grammatical rules.

The ever growing popularity of portable devices poses a threat to business security, so the BBC reported. As most firms are alerted, a recent survey by the UK Department of Trade and Industry shows that 33% of the firms in Britain have banned the use of such devices. However they have taken no attempt to change the configuration of PCs and laptops to avoid it from happening. Only 10% admit they have encrypted the confidential data stored on these portable devices.

But what can be dangerous about portable devices, you asked. While data theft—whether on purpose or by chance—might be a strong term to use, it may happen. An unofficial survey by Centennial Software revealed that 66% of people misplaced their USB sticks and that 60% of those devices had business information on them. Last year, several high-profile data theft incidents were discovered to have used portable devices such as USB sticks and MP3 players to store and steal data from banks and other large corporations. It proves to happen anywhere, as recently USB sticks full of US military secrets were sold on the market in Afghanistan.

Matt Fisher, Centennial’s vice president said:

“This perception of USB storage devices being ‘disposable’ is a massive risk to organizations’ business data. Losing control of a USB stick containing company secrets, even if only for a couple of hours, creates a serious risk of data leakage, identity theft and malware propagation. Everyone worries about the security of their laptops, but a USB drive can be even more valuable in terms of the information stored on it. Most of the data on these drives isn’t even encrypted to protect it from interested opportunists.”

When floppy disk started to emerge, it was made possible to transfer 360 kilobytes of data in five minutes, as Dennis Szerszen of Secure Wave said. But as the devices decrease in size, the capacity is increased. And now, given the same time, we can transfer four gigabytes of data.

Apart from that, the high mobility of the portable devices has put computers in high risk for virus problems. Firewalls and antivirus software may be useful against virus attack comes from e-mail, but not it is not so for viruses, worms and Trojan come from USB and FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports.

That is a warning for us mere users to be more careful with our USB sticks, iPods, and even digital cameras to prevent being labelled as data thief. Know what those devices do and becareful enough not to misplace them are the best we can do at this stage. Centennial has actually created Device Wall—a tool to help organizations to manage the security of mobile devices both on and away from the corporate network; but with the survey said that only 10% of those firms used such a tool, we do have reason to be most precautious.