Kingston coughs to security flaw in 'Secure' flash drive

Kingston Technology is instructing customers to return certain models of its memory sticks, after the firm discovered a glitch in its DataTraveler Secure flash drives.

The company said in a security notice that the models affected were "privacy" editions of the DataTraveler Secure, DataTraveler Elite and DataTraveler Blackbox.

Kingston said the security flaw could allow a wrongdoer to hack into the memory sticks.

"A skilled person with the proper tools and physical access to the drives may be able to gain unauthorised access to data," warned the vendor.

Kingston added that a number of its USB drives weren't affected by the security flaw.

Customers whose drives could be exploited by the security loophole should return the product, where Kingston said it would apply a factory update.

Kingston had claimed that its Data Traveler Secure drive was the first of its kind to protect "100 per cent of data on-the-fly via 256-bit hardware-based AES encrpytion".

It's also supposed to "meet enterprise-level security and compliance requirements", according to blurb about the drive on the firm's website. ®