VA buys 25K secure thumb drives

The Veterans Affairs Department awarded a contract to Kanguru Solutions of Millis, Mass., for 25,000 encrypted USB flash drives to help ensure the security of VA’s sensitive data. Kanguru will deliver the drives by the end of this month.The flash drives will help VA comply with a June Office of Management and Budget mandate to secure mobile data in the wake of the theft last year of a laptop containing the personal information of millions of veterans. Employees must use the approved thumb drives when they take sensitive data outside the network.The KanguruMicro Drive AES has 256-bit encryption and meets the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 for encrypting data. The drives come in capacities ranging from 256M to 8G.