DoD Looking to Remove Ban on Flash Drives (Conditionally)

The US' Department of Defense is apparently working to recover all the utility that has been lost due to its November 25th ban on flash drives. The ban came after a few years of embarrassing misplacements of extremely sensitive data. Unfortunately, by that time the drives had worked themselves into the daily lives of many of the employees and enlisted men and women. The thumbdrives allowed them to carry tons of technical manuals around and complete work in the evening and bring it with them without having to tote around a laptop. Flash drives also proved resistant dust and sand, which brought them into wide use in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now troops are being forced to come up with clumsy workarounds like emailing large files around and repetitively burning CD-ROMs.

As justification for the extra work they were dishing back on their staff the Air Force is claiming that 80% of the worms and viruses on their networks. Some of the solutions that the military may be looking at are system based like port locking and disabling such features like autorun. Commercial products like the Ironkey secure USB hard drive with multilevel data protection or the few others that have entered the secure data market. These functions will become more and more important as portable flash storage media become more and more effluent.