Survey Says: Mind Your Ports

By Greg McNevijn

April 24, 2007: According to a new Senforce Technologies survey, organisations are becoming more clued-in to removable storage threats, but many are still yet to do anything about them.

Reported on darkreading.com, Senforce says that 73 percent of those surveyed says that their organisation stores critical data on removable devices such as laptops and thumb drives.

The company interviewed over 300 attendees at this year’s InfoSec and FOSE trade shows in the US, 18 percent and 17 percent of which respectively said nearly half of their organisation's data sits on removable storage. A further 46 percent overall noted that their organisation does have, or at very least they are unaware of it having, a well developed endpoint security strategy.

“It comes up in every conversation I have with a customer,” Steve Stasiukonis, vice president and founder of Secure Network Technologies told darkreading.com. “It doesn't matter if it's stuff being taken out or coming in - they say they worry 50-50 about both. It's bad if a user brings it in and [pollutes] the network, or worse if they take something out and it gets into the hands of someone who can hurt [them].”

While these statistics can seem alarming, one consolation is that awareness of the problem is increasing, and there are many solutions on the market that enable secure, policy-based use of portable storage without forcing drastic measures such as physically disabling ports with resin or cutting wires.

The survey also found that 23 percent of respondents said their organisation had experienced a network security breach in the last 12 to 18 months, and only 44 percent were convinced that their network’s security when it came to encryption, endpoints, malware and wireless.

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