Imation Defender Removable Media – RSA 2011
February 15, 2011, San Francisco, CA – The growing challenge of data breeches was a topic of discussion at the recent RSA conference. Portable media leader Imation is addressing this challenge, and the 2008 ban on removable storage media in the government, with their new Defender product line. These products feature several new FIPS 140-2 Level 1 and Level 3 products ranging from optical disks to USB “thumb” form factor drives to USB external hard disks.
The issue of data breeches is growing and so is the cost impact. According to the Ponemon Institute, LLC in 2009 there were 498 reported data breeches, resulting in 220M records being released at an average cost of $204/record for remediation costs. This translates to an average of $6.6M per company over a 4 year period for cost of handling the data breech, lost business, audit and change of procedures, increased IT costs. A large number of these data breeches were not caused by hackers and malware, but were the result of lost and stolen removable media. This high rate of data breech and the risk of malware lead the DOD to ban USB drives in Nov of 2008.
Imation has now released a series of devices, over a very large price range, that are self-supporting or can be managed in an enterprise configuration, to address this need. At the lowest price end, they have released a self-encrypting writable media product for CD, DVD and Blu-Ray writers. These disks are avalable for as low as $2.00 each (SPR) for the 700Mb CD and are also available in 50 and 100 disk bulk packs. These CDs have data encrypting sofrware on the disk – occupying approx 40M of space – that supports password based encryption of the data being written and meets all FIPS 140-2 Level 1 criteria. This same structure is available for higher density DVD and Blu-Ray disks. In the event that the physical media is lost or stolen, the data is scured by the AES encryption scheme used to write the disk.
Secure Optical Disks – CD / DVD / BD
They have also several new FIPS 140-2 Level 3 products. They have a new USB thumb drive line and a USB connected external hard disk that use one factor (password) authentication. These are waterproof and tamper proof devices that have full data encryption and a built in security processor. They also have a series of two factor authentication products that use password and biometric fingerprint scan for the security encryption. These devices also feature a full security processor and policy manager software in the drive. The biometric security scan supports up to 10 users, and individual use and access policies can be set for each user on the same device. The flash drives are available from 1G-64G at this time and will be at 128G later in 2011, the hard disks support up to 500GB at this time and will be in multi TB later in 2011.
Defender F200 Biometric Flash Drive
To avoid the issue of malware and viruses in the Level 3 products, they support built in anti-virus and malware scanning from McAffee. The engine checks all files going through the device for infection prior to transfer and will not support storage of infected files on the device. The software use certificate based checking to insure that the USB connected device gets the virus updates from an authenticated source and does not get “spoofed” into receiving false virus signatures that could compromise the data on the device.
Defender H200 Biometric Hard Disk
For the enterprise use, there is a full set of authentication and provisioning software for control of the devices. This simplifies administration and allows for remote kill, data recovery, key management, and usage auditing of the devices. This software platform supports the full range of products fro the optical disks to the hard drives.
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