A social worker who took confidential work documents away from her office on a USB memory stick has been admonished by the Northern Ireland Social Care Council.
Mary Nash admitted to taking the documents and failing to keep them secure. A NISCC conduct committee decided a five-year admonishment on her record was an appropriate sanction, as she does not pose a risk to the public.
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Many, many social workers take home confidential documents on personal USB memory sticks.
During my time as a social worker and with the increased use of electronic record keeping, nearly everyone works with a personal USB stick.
Photocopiers now have facilities to copy direct to insecure USB sticks, email (insecure) sharing of confidential sensitive data is common place, such as sending client papers to agency worker Independent Review Officers via the likes of hotmail.co.uk accounts.
Employers offer no real guidance on the risks associated with the use of USB sticks or sharing sensitive data via email, or even the use of shared laptop computers.
As this case shows, responsibility is likely to be seen as primarily the Social Workers.
I deploy the following to secure my clients data and my reputation:
1) Only sending files to external email accounts, after I have placed them inside ZIP folder that is password protected. (encrypted) and sharing the password with the recipient over the phone or in person.
2) For USB sticks, after some trial and error, I now use a secure USB drive. All data on the drive is always encrypted, passwords are processed within the drive and after six incorrect passwords the data is erased.
After some searching I found the Integral Crypto Drive (£20) to be the cheapest, others like IronKey go for a whopping £100+
As these drives can be expensive and don't work with USB enabled photocopiers. A free option can be to create a secure container on an existing USB stick, the following links may help with this:
Rohos Mini Drive Encrypts Your USB Drive Files
http://lifehacker.com/5044260/rohos-mini-drive-encrypts-your-usb-drive-files
Encrypting a USB drive using TrueCrypt
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cert/EncryptingUSBTrueCrypt.html