Lack of Password Management Exposes 6000 Prisoners Details

In January 2009, it was reported that personal medical records of over 6000 prisoners and ex-inmates of Her Majesty’s Prison Preston, Lancashire, were exposed with the loss of a USB drive. Although the data on the drive was encrypted, the password for de-encryption was also written on an attached note.

Such incidents only highlight how susceptible we are to data leaks caused by missing USB drives. It also stresses the importance of secure USB drives with central management (like SafeConsole); this ensures that even if a USB drive is lost, data can be retrieved easily even from a remote location and the drive be deactivated. Hence, SafeConsole not only helps retrieve lost data, but also protects from data theft and leakage. And what goes for the password on the attached note, since SafeConsole has safe and easy password management users will not fall back to such terrible practices – there is simply no need to as users can be provided with automatic secure unlock of the devices when they are logged onto their machine user accounts.

More Benefits of Managing Encrypted USB Drives with SafeConsole

The above case in question could have been solved with secure centrally managed USB drives that offer the following benefits:

• Utilize secure local self-service password resets on the users own user account with certificate security.
• Help users in the field with remote password resets over phone, SMS or email relying on as secure challenge response procedure that meets the highest security criteria.

Moving beyond password management you can also reap the benefits of features such as:

• Helps distribute sensitive information directly to users. For instance, prison authorities can share sensitive information with authorized individuals directly in a safe and secure environment. The data is streamed from the server encrypted directly onto the authenticated device making this more secure than email.
• To distribute sensitive information, users can also send empty, secure and managed USB drives. This can be filled with information once the device reaches safe hands.
• The antimalware protection in the secure USB will activate once the drive is unlocked. The central management ensures that only listed executables are able to be stored.
• Administrators can deploy software to the centrally managed USB device at any time, even while they are on the move. The administrator can also invoke a trusted autorun batch script on a successful unlock making integrations a snap. In the script tokens can be utilized that are collected from the device user on setup.

Besides, SafeConsole ensure that a company’s mobile workforce is able to run a range of software and applications through their secure USB drives. It can also ensure that only SafeConsoleReady Devices are able to access the network.

Learn more about the useful features of SafeConsole >>