Europe failed the Kingston data security survey

The aim of the research was to assess how organizations manage the security and privacy requirements of data collected and stored on USB drives. The survey confirmed that while organizations believe in the paramount importance of security, many companies and institutions still ignore the risks posed by unencrypted USB drives and do not develop appropriate security policies for USB devices.

The European survey, an extension of previous research in the United States, confirms that organizations need to introduce more secure USB products and policies. A total of 3204 IT professionals from the UK, France, Germany, Northern Europe, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Poland, with an average of more than 10 years of IT or IT security experience, participated in the survey. They all recognized the importance of USB drives for productivity. Across Europe, 71 percent of respondents confirmed that their company does not have technologies in place to prevent or quickly detect when unauthorized people download confidential data to a USB drive. According to statistics, most organizations ignore the risk of using unencrypted USB drives, as a result of which most companies - 62 percent of those surveyed - have already lost confidential data due to USB drives missing in the past two years.

A comparison of individual European countries found that the highest level of security detection and protection practices in Germany was in Germany, where 62 percent believed that their company had adequate security policies for USB devices to prevent unauthorized use by employees. . In contrast, in France and Poland, employee practices pose the greatest risk: in France, 85 percent of respondents and 83 percent in Poland said employees use USB drives without obtaining prior permission.

A degree of vulnerability visibly extremely large:

• 75 percent of respondents say their company’s employees use USB drives without prior permission. 
• No less than 63 percent of respondents confirmed that employees always or very often fail to notify competent individuals when they lose a USB drive.
• France, the United Kingdom and Poland have the highest rates of unauthorized data access due to lost USB drives.

Source: Press release