back to article Survey: UK biz is using more encryption

Despite a run of high-profile security breaches, almost half of UK corporate laptops remain unprotected against theft and data loss, according to a survey of British businesses published on Thursday. Only 52 per cent of 320 UK public and private sector IT managers polled in the survey use data encryption on their corporate …

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  1. Joe Montana
    FAIL

    No standards

    The problem with encrypted removable media is that there is no standard whatsoever... So you end up with a small unencrypted partition containing a binary windows program that users are expected to execute in order to gain access to the data.

    Not only is this completely unusable for Linux/Mac users, but in many environments you would not be able to install the software anyway. Plus it adds yet another piece of software which almost certainly won't be centrally updated and will sooner or later end up full of security holes.

    USB sticks are typically only used when you want to transport data to a system which is outside of the corporate network anyway, since it would be pointless to use a usb stick when its much easier to copy data over the network... USB sticks are used when users have to take data off site, or give data to third party contractors...

    Also every vendor of such devices seems to implement their own software, and i doubt much of it has been thoroughly audited, and there have been several cases in the past where such software has had serious flaws in the encryption it uses.

    What's needed is a standard for encryption of removable media, so that an encrypted device can be connected to any computer and without the need to install software can be mounted upon entering of the correct key.

  2. Flash_Penguin
    Go

    Educate me....

    In a MS small business server 2003 environment what are my options to enforce encryption?

    What can I use to ENCOURAGE encryption?

    (Most likely the first step I will take)

    Can I build it into a corporate stick so that it it transparent (ish) to the user?

    I know google probably has the answer but real world experiences would be gratefully received.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I wonder how Nokia Lumia's fit into this with no on-device encryption?

  4. John F***ing Stepp

    OK, is there a market for a small latex protector for a USB device?

    Because we seem to have created one.

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