Manual (Button) System Reset of My Passport Wireless should be protected

I bought My Passport Wireless as an external drive I didn’t need to plug with a wire but could use both from a PC, and from a laptop, and from a tablet, and from a phone as well. Extremely portable and almost perfect. I work with my files wherever I am: at home, in office (mine ore my partners’ or clients’ etc.), in my car, in restaurant and so on, and I don’t have to copy my files from one device to another one. MPW is always in my briefcase and all I have to do to use it is to put it on. Very useful unit.

In terms of data protection it has:

  1. Two secure types of connection: Direct Connection and Public Wireless Network Connection.
  2. Password protection of the connection.
  3. Locking the Drive function (disabling USB connection).

However, all of them made null and void with one little operation: Manual System Reset. Push a couple of buttons and you get access to the disk! It’s nonsense, I suppose. What a sense in the Locking the Drive when System Reset exists?! So, Manual System Reset is the bottle neck of the MPW’s security system. If I leave my place for a couple of minutes (e. g. to visit a WC), someone can perform System Reset and then copy my files through wi-fi even after my return until I recognize something is wrong.

The problem should be solved immediately. There are different ways to do it. Optimal one, I suppose, is to provide to the user an option to change the default wi-fi settings and the default state of the Locking the Drive function. When the user decides it’s extremely important, he or she sets new defaults: Locking the Drive to be on, and connection type to be Direct Connection or Public Wireless Network Connection, and the type of encryption to be any secure one (WEP/WPA/WPA2), and wi-fi password to be any except null. These custom defaults replace factory defaults; and when anyone performs Manual System Reset, unauthorized access to the data on the disk remains impossible.

The issue of the password forgetting does exist. However, firstly, it’s the user who should choose what is more important for him (her), and who should care of password keeping. Secondly, for such a situation there could be a way for technical support to do factory system reset (with or without user data erasing). Such an approach is in use: some devices in some cases get locked in such a way that their unlocking is only possible by technical support. If it’s an excessive load for the technical support, just let the interface warn the user twice or triply about all the risks of data loosing before accepting and applying custom defaults. When I perform data backup with encryption I realize I can loose my data if I forget the key, but I use such a backup in spite of the risk.

Fix the bottle neck of Manual System Reset, please, as soon as possible.