beforeyoukillyourcomputer.com Saving computers one at a time from their owners

This bad boy isn’t your daddy’s USB porn drive (but maybe it should be). It’s the real deal for keeping your data safe and secure.

The IronKey USB flash drive is one of the most secure devices I’ve ever worked with, but simultaneously tries to be–and achieves being–among the simplest to interact with in achieving that security. The product, from the eponymous company IronKey, comes in capacities from 1 GB to 8 GB that encrypts data five ways to Sunday while achieving government certification as tamper evident. A secured, anonymized version of Firefox is also onboard. Prices start at $79 including a one-year subscription for anonymous browsing; an 8 GB drive is $299…

For starters, there’s hardware AES encryption on board the sleek metal drive: there’s no software to install on a host computer, and all encryption happens within the drive. This dramatically improves the security profile. Encryption keys are stored only on the drive, and only unlocked when a password you create at the time you initialize the drive is entered. (IronKey lets you back that password up on their secure Web servers with additional layers of authentication in case you forget it; accessing your account requires a digital certificate stored on the IronKey.)

Enter the password incorrectly 10 times, and the hardware fries itself. Likewise, if an IronKey is physically tampered with in an attempt to access the on-board flash memory directly, the hardware wipes memory as well. Their tamper-resistance has led to FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validation by the

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