While file sizes have gotten much bigger, that’s still a lot of data to carry around, especially if some of it is of a personal nature. Although smaller sizes are still available, the smallest flash drive you’re likely to see now can carry 8 GB of data which would have been enough to backup my first hard drive a few hundred times over. We’ve come a long way in the last three decades and now we have flash drives that can store tens of thousands of times as much data as the old 1.44 MB disk. I actually started out using the 5.25″ disk so the 3.5″ disk with it’s hard case and a little bit more space was a welcome improvement at the time. When I started using computers about 30 years ago, the floppy disk was the standard of personal data storage. That said, drives like IronKey's, which don't do any password authorization on the computer, are safer still.Personal data storage has come a long way … This blocks the simple attacks that SySS discovered and makes it orders-of-magnitude harder for a cracker to break into these drives. Once the update is in place, you can restore your data and get back to work.Įven with these updates, the password decryption on these drives is still done on the computer, but now each individual device has its own unique password. With Kingston, you'll need to contact technical support first for an update. In the case of SanDisk and Verbatim, you can get the update software from the company's website. Next, you should back up the drive and get ready to upgrade its software. Other than that common-sense recommendation, if you own one of those drives, get anything potentially sensitive off it. If someone doesn't have it in their hands, they can't do anything with it. So, what should you do? Well, the first thing as always with any of these devices is to take care of it. Once on the computer, SySS discovered that you could watch the password authorization process. When the device's software asks for you to enter a password, it places its device password on your computer to authorize your drive and your password. When you use a new encrypted USB drive for the first time, the drive already has a default device password. What has happened though is that it appears many vendors didn't think through how they let people use the encryption in the first place. Despite what you may have read from some fear-mongers, AES remains unbroken. It is not that the encryption itself-usually AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption-that has been broken. The German security company SySS GmbH discovered that many, but not all, of today's encrypted USB sticks and flash drives are actually vulnerable to a relatively easy attack. They're handy, you can use them on any PC, and with built-in encryption even if you lost them it was no big deal. If you're like me, you've taken to carrying important data on USB sticks or flash drives.
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