Toshiba Intros 8-GB Secure Digital Card
Toshiba plans to release another marvel next year, a Secure Digital (SD) card that can hold a whopping 8 GB of data. That’s 2,000 songs or 2,500 pictures from a 6-megapixel digital camera.
Roughly the size of a postage stamp, SD cards are used in everything from digital cameras to camcorders to PDAs. What makes Toshiba’s new card distinctive, outside of its capacity, is that it is capable of recording data at 6 Mbps.
At that speed, the card can be used for high-end consumer video cameras, such as Panasonic’s HDC-SD1 AVCHD 1080i camcorder, which records directly to a Secure Digital card.
Tiny Terror?
While Toshiba’s new card is raising the bar on pint-sized storage, it could raise the hackles of CIOs, data-center directors, and other I.T. professionals struggling to keep their networks safe from ill-intentioned employees.
“The insider threat has been increasing over the years,” said Khalid Kark, senior analyst and security expert at Forrester. Kark said he believes the threat from mobile mass storage tools will increase in the future.
“Specifically, we’re seeing threats coming in from USB keys, where they have a lot of storage capacity,” he said. “Companies are not able to handle that, because it’s really hard to manage USB keys.”
Indeed, USB keys, SD cards, Compact Flash cards, Memory Sticks, and other mass storage devices are par for the course with cell phones, smartphones, MP3 players, PDAs, and a host of other devices that employees bring to the office in their pockets.
With no more than a $20 device from any computer store, the average employee can walk off with thousands if not millions of customer names, phone numbers, birthdates, and worse: private health information or credit data.
“It’s becoming a huge issue,” said Kark.
Information Leak
In response, some companies are employing information leak protection (ILP) software that surveils their networks for consumer mass…
