[Infowarrior] - Kingston admits to insecure USB drives

[Richard Forno]

Kingston admits to insecure USB drives
All is not sound in Kingston town
By David Neal
Thursday, 31 December 2009, 12:20
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1567064/kingston-admits-insecure-usb-drives

MEMORY MAKER Kingston Technologies has confessed to security problems  
with a few of its secure USB drives.

In a security alert posted on its website the company released a brief  
statement about the drives, going so far as to ask owners to send them  
back. Once they've deleted their photos of course.

"It has recently been brought to our attention that a skilled person  
with the proper tools and physical access to the drives may be able to  
gain unauthorized access to data contained on the following Kingston  
Secure USB drives," the firm writes.

The affected drives are the DataTraveler BlackBox, Secure and Elite.  
It's worth noting that the latter two are subtitled the 'Privacy  
Edition' and that on its product pages the firm boasts of their  
government certified encryption and a whole lot of other things that  
are meaningless now.

While most companies will issue an alert and ask users to do their own  
tinkering, in this instance the firm is doing a factory recall,  
although not in so many words.

It says, "Contact Tech Support to arrange for a factory update of your  
drive", it says, adding, "Before sending your DataTraveler back to  
Kingston, please make sure you backup the data and then delete the  
contents of the drive. Once we receive your drive and apply the  
factory update process, any data still on the drive will be deleted." µ