Sweden’s military is investigating a major security breach after a member of staff left a memory stick holding classified data on a public computer.

Recently it was discovered that USB sticks full of US military secrets were being sold on market stalls in Afghanistan.

Nobody’s data is safe.
Normally I would recommend encryption, but if they are coming up for sale in quantity on the black market, you can bet that encryption codes and passwords are also readily for sale.

An informal survey by Centennial Software showed that 66% of people mislay USB sticks and that 60% of those devices have business information on them.

I know they make moving data from one computer to another simple, but what about things like security?
This take your work home and lose it is getting out of hand.

Forced encryption would take care of a lot of carelessness, but the black market is a criminal activity. There is nothing that can be done to stop it. All that can be done is to try and contain it.

There is also software that prevents the use of usb drives. This costs money, but it will help secure our data. More businesses, states and government agencies will implement it just as soon as there is a real penalty for losing our data.
—-This means probably never.—-