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UK Police Fined For Using Unencrypted Memory Sticks
An anonymous reader writes "The Information Commissioner's Office has filed a suit for £120,000 against the Greater Manchester Police because officers regularly used memory sticks without passwords to copy data from police computers and work on it away from the department. In July 2011, thousands of peoples' information was stolen from a officer's home on an unencrypted memory stick. A similar event happened at the same department in September 2010. 'This was truly sensitive personal data, left in the hands of a burglar by poor data security. The consequences of this type of breach really do send a shiver down the spine,' said ICO deputy commissioner David Smith."
Shouldn't they build or buy a system that allows employees to remote in? I work for a school system, and the school resource officers (which are city police officers) just VPN into their network from ours, so that they don't have to physically transport anything. Many of them even use computers provided by us instead of their highly-ruggedized but massively obsolete laptops...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yes, a fine against the police department will certainly show them! Oh wait.. isn't it the taxpayers who pay for their budget... sooo, wouldn't that mean the taxpayers will wind up paying for this? Some of them, twice even -- once for the loss of data, and again when they have to pay for it with their next tax return (admitedly, mere fractions of a pence, but it's the principle of the thing). That seems like a terribly effective method of teaching those officers not to leave sensitive data around! Far more effective, I think, then suspending one without pay or additional training how how to properly handle sensitive information.
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Really?
In 2012?
copy data from police computers and work on it away from the department.
Really? Aren't there such things as encryption and networks and the data staying on the bloody server?
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BMO
The problem is that there is simply no standard for encrypted removable storage... It seems every vendor of "encrypted" flash drives ships their own proprietary, usually windows-only binaries on the stick which may or may not work, and may or may not require various levels of privilege in order to install, and may or may not be full of all manner of security holes.
Pity the poor consultant carrying a windows laptop that contains all these various encryption drivers installed because he never knows what proprietary encryption scheme the next client will be using.
USB storage is a good standard, you can plug such a device into almost anything and it will be mounted and read... What we need is a similar standard for encrypted storage where you can plug it into almost anything, enter a password and it mounts without having to install any non standard drivers.
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Remove the usb-storage module, or blacklist it so that it cannot load.
Other classes of usb device have their own modules, which you can either leave alone or remove at your leisure if you want to use them (printers etc)...
You could also just disable the automount service, then no removable media will get mounted and you would need root in order to access it manually.
It's actually much easier than the various hoops people jump through to try and implement the same on windows.
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Back in the 90s my home in Canberra (Australia's capital and a government town) was burgled. The first, and I mean very first, thing the police asked on arrival was, "I there any classified information involved?" I was standing there in my Air Force uniform, so I guess it was a reasonable question. Nothing I was working at the time could even remotely be considered safe to take home, encrypted or not, so the answer was a no-brainer. I guess I was dismayed that the event was common enough that the automatic response had kicked in though. Some things, it seems, don't change.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
They really should have known better - the National Health Service has been lambasted on several occasions for similar data leaks and has thoroughly learned it's lesson. We are not permitted to mount unencrypted USB volumes any more.
But the encrypted drives we are required to use if we need to transfer data are purchased from a central contract - and cost us £64 ($103) for a 2GB flash unit. I'm not surprised if there is a certain reluctance amongst the police to purchase that kind of deal.
When I first saw that price I assumed they were some kind of military grade unit with a hardware encryption controller. They are not, they're just partitioned, with a custom driver in the first, plaintext, partition. So they are taking units that were probably about £5 (at the time) and making a very substantial mark-up.
Our standard advice on what to do with an encrypted drive after we're done with it is not to just wipe the key block, making the data into worthless noise, but to physically destroy it. I'm willing to bet that our friendly encrypted storage vendor thought that one up.
As you quite rightly say, there are other options. I estimated that I could knock together a solution using TrueCrypt - including all the features that the current solution has, like key escrow - and sell them for about £15 a go. You can't even *buy* 2GB flash drives at my usual retailer any more, or even 4GB units, so they'd have to put up with having 4 times the capacity. But I'd still be making a good margin - those 8GB drives are now around £5 retail. And the TrueCrypt solution has the advantage of working on every platform, not just Windows.