A week doesn’t go by without hearing of some government/corporate employee losing a flash drive or laptop with customer information. USB flash security is increasingly important to companies and individuals due to the sensitivity of losing personal information and critical business information. This article looks at how software and hardware solutions can be used to secure USB flash memory data.
Company employees have been using USB drives for the past decade to store customer data, employee information, intellectual property and a host of other sensitive information. Losing this information could result in court cases or massive loss of business if competitors were to see some data.
This makes USB flash security all the more important. You have two main ways to protect the information by using hardware or software solutions.
Hardware solutions involve using specialist USB drives with dedicated chips for encrypting information as it is being stored to memory. This can provide and additional level of security as high complexity passwords can be used to store the information. In the event of someone attempting a mechanical recovery of data (directly reading the memory) the information should be suitably encrypted.
The software option is more common where users make use of products like BitLocker to Go or FreeOTFE to password protect folder contents as they are written to memory. This makes the data inaccessible to anyone attempting to read the drive contents. If users have sufficiently complex passwords then hackers should have difficulty decrypting the information.
Either solution should provide comparable levels of security without impacting portability so long as the encryption algorithms used have not been cracked and users do not use plain simple passwords.0
Most companies will provide their own company policy USB flash security which employees should adhere. For individuals, using some form of password protection on USB memory drives should be as important as backing up the data regularly
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