People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like - Abraham Lincoln
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Kingston admits to insecure USB drives
MEMORY MAKER Kingston Technologies has confessed to security problems with a few of its secure USB drives.
In a security alert posted on its website the company released a brief statement about the drives, going so far as to ask owners to send them back. Once they've deleted their photos of course.
"It has recently been brought to our attention that a skilled person with the proper tools and physical access to the drives may be able to gain unauthorized access to data contained on the following Kingston Secure USB drives," the firm writes.
The affected drives are the DataTraveler BlackBox, Secure and Elite. It's worth noting that the latter two are subtitled the 'Privacy Edition' and that on its product pages the firm boasts of their government certified encryption and a whole lot of other things that are meaningless now.
While most companies will issue an alert and ask users to do their own tinkering, in this instance the firm is doing a factory recall, although not in so many words.
It says, "Contact Tech Support to arrange for a factory update of your drive", it says, adding, "Before sending your DataTraveler back to Kingston, please make sure you backup the data and then delete the contents of the drive. Once we receive your drive and apply the factory update process, any data still on the drive will be deleted." µ
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Yes let's all link to unknown sites by using tinyurls, while discussing security, because it's an ideal time to explore the concept or irony.
One of the links I gave relative to a sell off of our private and confidential files failed so here’s the full URL:
http://www.eadt.co.uk/content/eadt/news/story.aspx?brand=EADOnline&category=News&tBrand=EADOnline&tCategory=xDefault&itemid=IPED01%20Jan%202010%2021%3A43%3A21%3A123
UK Govt certified encryption proves to be rubbish.
With this Governments obsession collecting and storing as much of our private and confidential details it is therefore alarming to discover that UK Govt certified encryption used for protecting these Pen Drives is pretty well useless story link below.
http://tinyurl.com/yevfhqz
This surveillance and Data Collection Technology may already be being used by Counter Intelligence Services from other counties. As was alleged lately by the release of e-mails and Faxes relating to alleged falsified figures being given by officials concerning ‘Global Warming’.
http://carl-agpcuk.livejournal.com/1205.html
We read that there is a sell off of our private and confidential files read story here:
http://tinyurl.com/ylg5bu6
Is Big Brother UK selling your DNA for profit? http://carl-agpcuk.livejournal.com/3111.html
So is (so-call) ‘Big Brother’ the really Bad Guy?
Signed Carl Barron Chairman of agpcuk
Owing to the wear-levelling alogrithms. When you overwrite a block of data, it leaves the old one where it is, allocates a new one, and copies the new data to it (along with any of the old data that wasn't overwritten).
It can be done, but you'd have to overwrite the entire drive multiple times to make sure you'd cycled through all of the available flash write blocks. And there's still a tiny chance that one of the blocks might go bad just in the course of overwriting and be added to the bad blocks list with its old content intact and never overwritten, although that's pretty minimal.
Anyone caring about their privacy and security who ended up with such USB drives and doesn't understand how data recovery works deserves to send their data to China... Maybe at the Chinese factories and their Party cells they will care about the "security-conscious" people's data more.
Note to the rest: Use proper data erasing techniques and tools before even contemplating parting with your data device.
And next time consider twice about using "security" products by companies which simply advice you to "delete and send it away".
wonder whether the UK government would be better off losing any one of these Kingston drives in the mail...