Statistics from the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry show that 33% of companies have banned the use of portable storage devices but do almost nothing to enforce those rules in the workplace. It means that insiders can easily remove corporate secrets to USB drives, smartphones and iPods. However, experts at InfoWatch stress that business should, and could, be doing more because products to address the problem already exist.
Warnings are being voiced more and more often about the dangers of allowing uncontrolled use of portable gadgets in the workplace. The most recent calls for more control have come from experts in the UK, worried about telephones, music players and flash drives that connect to the USB ports of PCs, the BBC reports.
IT security specialists are particularly concerned about the fact that employees can download any kind of sensitive information to these portable devices, which can then fall into the hands of competitors or criminals, either by chance or deliberately. According to data revealed by a government-backed survey, more than half of UK companies take no steps to minimize the related risks or to apply control over portable media.
The UK Department of Trade and Industry found that 33% of companies do not allow their employees to use portable devices in the workplace, though in practice there are no technological measures in place to enforce those kinds of policies. As a result, employees using PCs and laptops can continue to copy data on to flash drives, smartphones, iPods etc. In other words, the IT security policy is merely floating around with nothing to hold it in place. To overcome this, the security policy has to be enforced at the level of PCs and laptops by installing special products that control the transfer of data via the communication ports of a computer.
“Today, there are lots of companies that are completely defenseless against insiders using flash drives. Those companies realize that if they were to completely block the use of USB ports, they would lose an important functional aspect of their workstations. However, there are modern solutions that can specifically prevent leaks of confidential information, while allowing unrestricted copying of other types of data to portable devices,” explains Denis Zenkin, marketing director at InfoWatch.
Source: SecurityLab.ru
