Do you ever feel, walking around with your laptop, as though you’re tempting fate? For many of us, everything is on there—e-mail, personal information, photographs, perhaps financial information. And what if it’s on loan from the law firm or hospital where you work? In cases like that, you’re probably carrying around extremely sensitive data. What if the laptop got stolen?
Toshiba has you covered. The company recently announced a hard drive that’s smart enough to lock down data—or even automatically erase it—if anyone who isn’t supposed to access the device tries to. The drive, which was recently exhibited in Japan and should be available for purchase by the second quarter of this year, allow users to choose from a wide menu of security options. According to Toshiba (via ComputerWorld), you can set select data on the drive to be encrypted, and you can set different mechanisms for triggering a wipe: you might have it wiped every power cycle, for instance, or if an uncertified host connects, or if the drive receives several invalid requests to unlock itself. Toshiba claims the ability to trigger a wipe in that last case is an “industry first.”
This isn’t just a standard wipe, either. The usual method is to overwrite the data on the hard drive several times. That’s not very secure—simple shareware tools can be used to undo the erase, according to Geek.com. The special Toshiba wipe doesn’t just mangle the data; it throws away the keys needed to decipher it. This is called a “crypto-erase”—the same thing Apple will do for you if you lose your iPhone.
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