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The data reveals a 22% rise in the risk of device losses in 2021 compared with 2019 across London journey types used by commuters, which includes London Buses, London Overground, TFL Rail, Docklands Light Railway and Emirates Air Line.[1]

Many workplaces are now switching to hybrid working, requiring employees to only be present in offices for part of a working week, and staff are using multiple devices in different locations, often storing their work on portable storage devices that they carry with them on journeys.

But while offices use robust internal IT cybersecurity and DLP (data loss prevention) to avoid data leaks and the theft of critical company data, these are no longer effective when data is taken outside the corporate environment. This can have a damaging financial impact, as well as the potential for reputational damage to an organisation, including loss of customer trust.

“Misplacing a USB stick, external SSD, hard disk, phone or even a laptop on public transport is a mistake that’s all too easy for anyone to make,” said Ann Keefe, Regional Director UK & Ireland at Kingston Technology Europe.

“Besides the value of that device, any data held on it such as personal details, confidential documents, customer information, or company secrets could fall into the wrong hands. In many cases, the potential cost of a data leak dwarfs the value of the device that was lost. Everyone should make sure that data stored on portable devices is secure to prevent this scenario from occurring.”

Kingston Technology recommends business-grade hardware-based encryption to protect devices and data from being stolen. Kingston’s IronKey range of USB flash and SSD external storage including Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 50 encrypted USB stick and Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80 encrypted SSD provide secure and reliable protection for organisations.

With hardware-encrypted external storage, encrypting and decrypting of files is performed on the drive itself and independent of a host computer. Kingston IronKey encrypted storage devices rely on the robust Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) encryption to keep data safe according to an internationally agreed standard.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 50

Kingston IronKey™ Vault Privacy 50 (VP50) is a premium USB drive that provides business-grade security. It supports Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) as defined in FIPS 197, which the US government has verified as secure enough for classified information, and has so far never been broken.

It also protects against other forms of attack, such as brute force password attacks[2] and malware over USB[3]. It supports multiple passwords for both admin and user modes, and has a built-in virtual keyboard to prevent passwords from being leaked from keyloggers or screen scrapers.

Kingston IronKey Vault Privacy 80

Kingston IronKey™ Vault Privacy 80 (VP80ES) External SSD is Kingston’s innovative hardware-encrypted external SSD with touch-screen for data protection. It offers the same highest level of FIPS 197 data security as VP50, but with passwords controlled and entered via a touch-sensitive display built right onto the drive itself.

It offers configurable password rules allowing administrators to customize VP80ES security levels, including password length, pin or passphrase modes, read-only protection

1 2,486,750,329 total journeys in April 2021 - March 2022, with 16,680 devices lost. 3,817,861,444 total journeys in April 2019 – March 2020 with 20,934 devices lost, resulting in a 22.33% higher chance of a lost device in 2021/22. This dataset does not include taxi journeys, trams or any data from Victoria station.
2 After a number of incorrect password attempts, attackers can be either locked out or data can be securely wiped
3 Digitally signed firmware protects against BadUSB malware attack