Ultra-secure USB key intro'ed by Swiss Army knife maker

A new super-secure flash memory drive from the maker of the Swiss Army pocket knife withstood a $150,000 bounty offered to hackers to try and crack into the drive.

Victorinox said its new Victorinox Secure flash drives, with 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB storage capacities, include a self-destruct mechanism, thermal sensor, and fingerprint identification.  The drive is protected by Victorinox's in-house security chip working on top of a 256-bit AES encryption.

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It remains unknown how the reported self-destruct mechanism works, but it will burn the flash drive's memory chip and CPU if someone tries to physically tamper with the drive.  The IronKey has a similar feature, but it simply deletes the content off the drive, rather than physically destroying the key.

The Secure drives also have a blade, ballpoint pen, scissors, screwdriver, key ring, and LED mini light.

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During testing, the manufacturer offered a $150,000 prize to professional hackers if they were successful in their attempts to crack the drive's security measures.  No one was able to claim the bounty, with the company saying the Secure is "the most secure [device] of its kind available to the public."

A drastic increase in high-profile data breaches related to notebooks, flash drives and other portable data drives has led to security-geared product releases from manufacturers.  Kingston launched an ultra-secure flash drive earlier in the year, with IronKey and Corsair previously entering the market.

These types of products intrigue me because some of the additional security features offered are so peculiar. If you have a need to heavily lock down your data, you now have multiple options via these portable, security-minded USB flash drives.

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