| Flash Drives: The quickest way to lose confidential data? |
| Written by Ct R. Hamith | |
| Monday, 18 April 2011 07:08 | |
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So we here again, Hong Kong’s Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) is following up on a possible case of confidential data leakage involving a USB device lost on the public transport system. to remind employees to avoid storing confidential and sensitive data in USB flash drives. The Hong Kong Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data is again involved less than 2 weeks after it released a report on a similar incident following the loss of a flash drive containing patients’ personal data at United Christian Hospital.
Of course, the loss of storage devices such as this is not so much about the device itself but rather about the data it contains – now it’s pretty much impossible to stop people losing these devices as they are relentlessly get smaller in size yet their storage capacity is increasing: so in essence, technology is making it much easier to lose much more!
And its not just the fact that thumb drives are getting smaller either, its becoming increasingly hard to determine what isn’t, a thumb-drive…. iPOD’s, Mobile Phones, Digital Camera’s all contain mass-storage capability creating a major headache for organizations concerned with securing sensitive data: standard storage devices are becoming smaller with new type of mass-storage appearing all the time; today you can even buy a pen with a USB drive built-in. - By Richard Moss, Jan 13, 2009 |
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 21 April 2011 06:52 ) |
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Did You Know
Identity theft is the top consumer complaint in the
US
Credit card fraud (25%) was the most common form of reported identity theft in the
More than 100 000 people are affected by identity theft each year in the
According to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, more than 350 data loss incidents involving more than 140 million records have occurred since February 2005
Organisations are obliged by law to take take adequate steps to ensure the proper disposal of data