Endpoints can be almost anything – USB drives, iPods, laptop computers, cell phones, even digital cameras with SD cards. Billions of dollars have been spent making sure brilliant hackers can’t attack computers from across the globe. But firewalls generally don’t stop anyone from attaching a finger-size drive to a computer and stealing gigabytes worth of secrets from a company or government agency.

Oddly enough, security breaches or data leakage through this form is usually never intentional. It usually just ends up being a careless employee who’s trying to get their work done quicker. The network is slow, permissions are acting up, email file size limitations, whatever the reason, and it’s probably never intentional. With the size of USB thumb drives getting smaller and smaller, it’s not hard for these things to be misplaced, or even forgotten about.

The situation is serious, but not hopeless. Making sure you have solid policies in place is a good start. Protecting important documents with encryption is an even better start. There are many makers of thumb drives with built in encryption mechanisms. You can even opt for a full on encryption suite for you company that includes a form of removable storage encryption. There are some that include mini-software packages that will allow you to decrypt the data on a system that doesn’t have the master encryption suite installed.

But encryption isn’t the only answer. A simple process of purging thumb drives could eliminate left over documents that the user simply forgot to delete of the drive.

So let’s not forget that even with the most robust firewall protection and million dollar network security solutions. A single careless employee an easily circumvent all these, and nine times out of ten, it’s probably unintentional.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 3:11 pm by Tim Donaworth and is filed under data protection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.