US gets Kingston encrypted USB flash

WITH DATA leakage causing panic up and down the corridor, it seems that the way to handle it, as it is with all security, is through encryption.

In this case, encrypted USB sticks.

Kingston Tech has come up with a flash stick called the black box. For only $165 (2GB) or $424 (8GB) you can have the peace of mind of water resistance, 256 bit AES encryption and a five year guarantee.

It gives you ten, count them, attempts at remembering your password, before it locks up.

They are very proud of their baby because it is its "first Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)-validated USB Flash drive” which is a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standard and the Communications Security Establishment of the Government of Canada. “This is critical because many governmental agencies in the United States and Canada mandate that sensitive "data at rest" (i.e. all information not in the network) must be encrypted with the FIPS 140-2 standard.””

It is critical if you are a civil servant in an ex-colony. The only drawback is that it is not yet available in the UK and they can‘t tell us if or when it will be.

The spec: USB 2.0 compliant and 1.1 compatible; Two free consecutive drive letters required for use, Operating System - Windows Vista (32-bit only); Windows 2000 (SP3, SP4); Windows XP (SP1, SP2).

"We are very excited that our DataTraveler BlackBox met all federal requirements established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)," said Mark Akoubian, Flash memory product manager, Kingston.

And we are jolly excited too.

Earlier panics here and here and finally here