Corporate
Confidential Information Left Exposed on Hotel and Internet Cafe Computers
You
might not realize it, but each time you or your employees travel
and use a computer that is not their own, private and sometimes
confidential information is left behind.
When
you open a document from your USB drive a temporary copy is stored
on the local drive, when you use the local browser you leave cookies,
history of the visited sites and more. It is obvious that a professional
security solution is required to ensure that this does not happen.
With
capacities reaching that of a DVD and a physical size which enables
carrying on a keychain, portable storage devices, mainly in the form
of USB flash disks, have become a preferred method for moving data
around. According to a report by Gartner, sales of these devices jumped
from $136 Million in 2003 to $613 million in 2004, and is expect to
reach $3 Billion by 2008.
Many
users carry their data on these portable drives, together with some
application programs, instead of toting a portable PC. Once they get
to a PC - at work, at an internet caf? or a customer site, they simply
plug in their portable drive and work with their data.
However,
this poses several data security and privacy threats. Their small
size, make USB flash drives easy to misplace or lose. Considering
the fact that they may contain the equivalent data of more than 1000
floppy disks, this is a lot of data that can fall into the wrong hands.
Another
thing to consider is that while one may think that when working on
any PC the data remains on the USB flash disk, the truth is that a
lot of the data, together with personal information is left on temporary
files on the hard disk of the PC in the course of normal work.
Therefore
users of portable drives need some special tools that will help them
overcome the threat that their data will fall into unauthorized hands,
or that their personal data will remain on the hosting PC where they
did their work.
Two such
products are Keynesis Lockngo Professional and Keynesis Portable Sweeper,
for which their maker - Keynesis Ltd. released new versions today.
Keynesis
Lockngo is a portable security product, which provides users with
a simple to operate fast and robust solution for data protection on
portable drives. It offers several levels of security - from file
system encryption to full data 256-bit AES encryption and wipeout
of deleted data.
It also
includes powerful command line tools for advanced users and system
administrators, which are required to support multiple drives within
the organization or perform batch operations.
In this
new update Keynesis increased the maximum amount of data that can
be encrypted, thus providing support to the increasing storage space
provided by the latest portable drives.
Keynesis
Portable Sweeper offers users of portable storage devices a friendly
privacy protection solution that cleans personal data which may have
otherwise been left behind on a host computer, to which the portable
drive is plugged. Keynesis Portable Sweeper removes Internet private
information such as: cookies, temporary files, visited sites history,
address bar and also cleans from the computer system data such as
search history, recent docs history, scandisk files, clipboard memory,
temporary files directory, download program files directory, recycle
bin, start/run history, swap file and recent network drives.
In this
updated version a multi level wiping mechanism was added. Many users
believe that deleting files removes them from the hard disk. In fact,
the data remains on the disk and only information which is used by
the operating system to access the data is modified so that accessing
them through the operating system is no longer possible.
However,
using low level data reading and restoration tools this "deleted"
information can be retrieved. The wiping mechanism writes random binary
information to the area occupied by the deleted files and removes
all traces of the original deleted data from the PC hard disk.
Keynesis
is an innovative company focused on commercializing smart, friendly
and intuitive products for the highly-demanding and fast-growing market
of portable devices. Keynesis executes an aggressive marketing approach
supported by rapid development of new products for the portable device
market.
All Keynesis
products share common attributes which address specifically the needs
of applications for portable drives -they run directly from the portable
storage device with no installation whatsoever on the PC. They are
simple, intuitive, fast and small.
"The
release of these updates is another step in providing solutions which
address specific needs of users of portable drives, and emphasizes
Keynesis' commitment to this market ." says Gilad Barak, the
Business Development Manager of Keynesis.
For more
information about
Keynesis visit their website.
