Kingston admits to insecure USB drives

[DaBees-Knees]

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."

"In this instance the firm is doing a factory recall."

Just a warning in case you have one.