There are a fair few secure hard drives and thumb drives which allow you to remotely wipe them - but a new gadget from British drive maker Secure Drives forges off into Mission Impossible territory with a genuine, physical 'self-destruct' command which can be triggered from anywhere on Earth, The Verge reports.
When you text it a pre-determined ‘kill command’ (a phrase of your choosing, which can be sent from any phone), the built-in GSM aerial receives the text, and physically destroys the hard drive IGN reports.
The gadget doesn’t rely on anything magnetic - it physically fragments both the flash drive and the security controller, The Verge reports.
Secure hard drive: Kill command
Secure Drive says that the devices are built specifically to impede any form of data recovery tehnique.
The Verge points out that the drives comply with data protection laws in more than 100 countries, saying, ‘Secure Drives boasts that its Autothysis drives conform with more than 100 country-specific data protection laws.’
The destruction process can also be set up so that it’s triggered by anyone blocking or cutting off GSM signal, tampering with the casing, or from the gadget running out of batteries, or being removed from its host PC.
Tamper-proof
If that wasn’t secure enough, the gadget also ships with a two-factor authentication Token with its own instant-kill command, which tells the gadget to commit suicide in one tap.
Secure Drive says, ‘No amount of computer processing power will help if a NAND Flash can't be mounted onto a PCB. The whole design approach of this Drive was based on reverse engineering data recovery techniques.’
