Stuff South Africa

This hard drive will self-destruct in 5 seconds – provided you send it an SMS

Keeping our cat pictures extremely safe is something that we’ve all considered at one time or another but actually implementing it has been a chore. Hollywood has it easy, as the really sensitive stuff can be set to self-destruct with a phone-call or digital command, and now you’ll be able to do it to – provided you’re willing to pay for it.

Secure DrivesA UK company called SecureDrive have come up with their Autothysis128t solid-state drives, which are 128GB self-encrypting units that feature 256-bit AES CBC hardware level encryption. Hefty stuff, to be sure, but that’s not enough paranoia for some users.

But these drives are also designed to “…fragment the NAND Flash along with the security controller to impede any data recovery technique that might be applied in an attempt to gain access to the encrypted data”. The whole concept has been designed around recovery techniques and how to circumvent them.

It’s really the destruction methods available to users that caught our eye though. The prime destruction method is an SMS-delivered kill switch that sets off the physical destruction of the drive but there are also other options for users. Removing the drive from a machine, if it goes out of range of a set GSM signal or PIN code failure are the less exciting options.

If the Autothysis128t was cheaper, we’d be tempted to get one specifically to destroy it from long range with an SMS. But at around R18,700 per drive, you’d better be really sure that you don’t want your content to fall into the wrong hands before setting things in motion.

Source: The Verge

Exit mobile version