Kanguru Blog: December 18, 2020 - “This is probably one of the biggest and most dangerous breaches we’ve seen so far,” says Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent for the Washington Examiner on a Fox News panel with Bret Baier.
December 2020 finishes off a year of unprecedented events; national cyber security not withstanding. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security implemented an Emergency Directive after it was revealed that Russian hackers are suspected to have conducted a large-scale, ongoing cyber intrusion into agencies of government, critical infrastructure, and even private companies. Bret Baier opened his December 17 news broadcast stating “The Cyber Attack- this hack is expansive. It is likely still ongoing according to Senior Intelligence Officials. We don’t know the extent of it. We know it has touched a number of government agencies…”
The latest cyber security attack, the scale of which is yet unknown at this time and is perhaps still ongoing, has every indication of being one of the worst cyber security breaches in the Government and private sector. Russia and China appear to be the worst offenders to the U.S. currently, with ongoing virtual invasions to critical areas of national infrastructure.
“China aims to replace the United States as the world super-power,” states Tom Cotton of the Senate Intelligence Committee in his interview with Fox News. “They don’t have the know-how, they don’t have the technical ability, they don’t have the people and the brilliance of our researchers, and our scientists to do that on their own. That’s why they hack into our universities, our laboratories, our businesses to try to steal our technology. Russia tends to hack into systems and then release the information using it for propaganda, or misinformation purposes.”
U.S. Officials have stated that they still do not know what they don’t know, and to what extent this breach has compromised sensitive and critical data. CISA continues to investigate, and measure the extent to which this data breach has infiltrated.
With the advantages and convenience of global internet access, comes the clear disadvantages of illegal access by nefarious cybercriminals who have the explicit intent and the desire to steal sensitive information. Much needs to be done to secure data away from these hackers. One proven method is storing sensitive data on local, hardware encrypted USB drives, secured by local encryption keys which are never stored in the cloud. These hardware encrypted USB data storage drives can then be managed remotely by Security Officers with a secure remote management interface separate from the data.
The Benefits of Remotely Managed, Locally-Stored Data on Encrypted USB Drives
There is no doubt that the safest place to store and conduct business with sensitive data is on locally-stored, secure USB drives. As mentioned above, the data is secured by local encryption keys which are never stored in the cloud. Data stored on Kanguru Defender® Hardware Encrypted USB Drives is protected from unauthorized access under full military-grade, AES/XTS 256-Bit hardware encryption, RSA-2048 digitally-signed secure firmware, and onboard Anti-Virus.
In addition, IT Administrators and Security Officers can manage, monitor, locate, communicate with and even delete lost or stolen secure USB drives with Kanguru Remote Management Console™ (KRMC™).
Industries in Government, Defense, Medical/Healthcare, Financial/Banking, Education, Research, Energy and Utilities trust Kanguru Defender secure flash drives, hard drives and SSDs along with KRMC to successfully secure information. Kanguru provides data security solutions to highly-secure companies and organizations around the world, and has been doing so for over two decades.
For detailed information on maintaining data security with Kanguru’s secure data products, see our product line of Defender secure USB drives and our Kanguru Remote Management Console options.