Some sites are reporting that some USB drive encryption has been “broken”. That’s not exactly correct.
There has been a flaw found in the way the authentication works from the software to the drive itself. As a matter of fact, it’s really stupid and moronic from a security standpoint. The worst part is that multiple vendors used the SAME KEY, and these exact drives actually passed low-level government certification. Here are the vendors so far:
- Kingston
- Verbatim
- Sandisk
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How to Encrypt Securely
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screenshot truecrypt
I’ve written about encryption before – and the best way to encrypt your computers and USB drives is through TrueCrypt with AES 256bit. Period. For instance, my entire laptop hard drive is encrypted. If someone steals my laptop and closes the lid – game over. I also encrypt my USB backup drives. My data is that important to me.
Also worth mentioning is the IronKey USB drive which does not have the flaw of the other drives.
Why should you encrypt your data? If the data is not important, then you don’t really need to – but if you have financial information, personal information, etc, then you should encrypt it.