The headline has been a familiar one over the past year, as laptops are lost or stolen and unencrypted personal details of staff contained on the hard drive are put at risk. Fortunately, most laptops are stolen not for their data but for simple resale. But laptop thieves don’t usually use special data-erase programmes before selling on, so the victim’s data, although invisible to the “naked eye”, is still there.Companies that don’t take care to protect such data against theft can face spectacular fines, as a major UK bank found earlier this year. Enter Seagate with its encrypted hard drive. The disk-drive maker announced this month that it's working on a hard drive with native encryption that will protect all the data on a stolen machine. The drive will contain embedded chips which will encrypt all the data on the drive. Then if the machine is stolen, the thief would have to come up with a password at minimum and two- or three-factor authentication at best.
Seagate expects to ship in mid-2008 a 1 terabyte desktop hard drive that uses US government-grade encryption. Nicknamed the Barracuda 7200 FDE, the 3.5-inch drive has native encryption. Using AES encryption, the hard drive is designed to deliver end-point security for powered-down systems. Logging back on requires a pre-boot user password that can be beefed up with biometrics and smart cards.
Expect laptop versions to follow.
