Aegis solid-state hard drive has fast transfer rates and nearly foolproof security

In the cartoons I watched growing up, important things were always locked behind oversize padlocks. And you know what they say about the more things change.

The Aegis Padlock resembles those padlocks from my cartoon days. It’s a solidly built rectangle that is 3.3 inches by 4.7 inches. It’s 0.75 inches thick and weighs 6.7 ounces. The front of the Padlock features a number pad. The bottom two nonnumber buttons on the pad are a Cancel button and an open lock symbol, which serves as the Enter key for the device. Each button lives on its own rubberized island, so the keys are not mashed together. You won’t accidentally hit a 6 when you mean to punch 5, no matter how large your fingers are.

The design of the keys resists moisture. And beyond that, they also resist wear and tear, which is important to avoid tipping off potential hackers about which keys are used most frequently.

The device is actually a 750G hard drive. You can unhook a small USB cord from a carrying notch along the right side of the device and connect the drive to a computer. The cord is a little short for use with most desktop systems, requiring the unit to hang down from the front of the computer. But the Padlock ships with a USB extension cord to alleviate that problem. The cord also splits on one end to accommodate a female and male USB dongle on one end, should you run into the very odd situation of a nonstandard USB port.

When you plug the Padlock into a computer, nothing happens. There is a red light that illuminates at the bottom of the device to show that it’s connected, but it does nothing at all. Host computers will recognize that something is attached to a USB port, and clicking on the drive icon in the overview window will trigger an Insert Disk Into Drive warning. Needless to say, you can’t access the Padlock by just plugging it into a system.

You need to type your personal identification number on the pad and then hit the little unlock symbol. The red light will turn green, and the computer will then start the process of installing the drive.

Besides encryption, the device is protected from hacking in several ways. If a PIN is entered incorrectly too many times, the device will turn itself off. To try again, you need to remove it from a computer and reinsert it. That foils any automated attempts at PIN guessing by requiring a manual reinsertion. But it keeps track of how many wrong attempts are made, even when the drive is removed and reinserted into a computer. If too many attempts are made, the Padlock assumes that it’s under attack. It then destroys its own encryption key, rendering the drive effectively useless. You can still reset the drive at that point if you want to use it, but its data is gone forever.

Device setup is extremely easy. There is no software to fiddle with. In fact, the drive comes with a little paper note card that walks you through the initial setup of entering your PIN and configuring security protocols. You could have as many as 10 users, each with their own PINs and a single administrator for each device.

In that sense, the Padlock would make a good way to securely transfer large files or collaborate among users. Even remote users could benefit if they were provided PINs to access the drive. You could simply FedEx the Padlock with the data and feel secure that it will be protected in all phases of transit.

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The first new product I've heard about for this season that will be a good fit for advisers is the Apricorn Aegis Padlock, a 750 GB portable secure hard drive.

For those that are unaware of the potential for disaster and want to understand why it is important to begin using encryption with your client data check out the “related stories” below (it is not pretty).

With its small form factor (the drive itself is a 2.5-inch and the device weighs in at just 6.7 oz.), high-speed USB 2.0 connection, and no installation or software required, the Aegis Padlock is a convenient and secure way for those advisers that just have to transport their data with them.

If you must use a portable drive, this model provides you with some built in protections including a keypad requiring a six- or twelve-digit pin to unlock the device. There is software out there that can be used to harden a portable drive, meaning add encryption to it, but that requires extra effort on your part or that of your administrative/technology staff. There are also models that use biometrics (fingerprint scanners for example) or security tokens as well but again that can add an additional layer of complexity.

With this device you enter your pin and it unlocks the device. Otherwise the data on board stays encrypted while at rest (meaning when it is off/unplugged). The encryption level is your choice of 128-bit or 256-bit AES.

There is also an administrative feature that allows “enrollment of up to 10 unique user ID's,” meaning that the device can be shared between people in an office or team.

It is very simple to set up though, I did not go slowly enough when first setting up the device: I had a time getting the default administrative PIN number changed to my own choice but did after two tries. I believe I was just proceeding too quickly. The very clear directions on the single-page “Quick Start Guide” that accompanies the device are easy to follow even if there are seven steps. Despite my screw up, I still had it set up and ready to go within 10 minutes.

One caveat for Mac users: The device arrives preformatted in NTFS file format, which is for use with Microsoft Windows operating systems (XP, Vista, and Windows 7). While the features table on the box list “Windows, Mac and Linux” on the row entitled “Compatibility,” keep in mind that to use the drive with a computer running a version of the Macintosh operating system you will have to reformat it (there are instructions on the reverse side of the guide referred to above).

Several things set this device apart in terms of security. First is its military grade FIPS PUB 197 validated encryption algorithms.

Next, the device has a built-in “brute force self destruct feature.” Basically what this means is that the drive won't appear (for example in your Windows task tray or Windows Explorer) or be available after it is plugged in until it is unlocked — meaning the correct PIN number has been entered. After several incorrect entries (the company will not, for security reasons, state how many this is) the drive will lock itself. You or a thief/hacker would then have to unplug it and plug it in and start the process over again (the idea being that a more sophisticated thief/hacker would be inconvenienced and couldn't plug it in and run a program that continually hammers the device with potential PIN numbers). Lastly, once an undisclosed (again, for security reasons according to the company) number of failed PIN entries are made the device's own logic decides, “Aha, someone is really trying to hack me” and in turn self-destructs, meaning it deletes the valid encryption key. That takes the drive back to factory default, requiring a new PIN and encryption key and the encrypted data on it becomes useless.

If you’re serious about backup, and in this day and age with the increasing storage needs of businesses & consumers alike, then you probably should be. We have a look at Apricorn’s latest Aegis Padlock 750GB Encrypted Portable Drive today.

Have you considered how secure your backups are?

Any IT professional will tell you backing up on-site is as-good-as not having a backup at all because if you have a fire, you can say good bye to your servers and your backup devices. So the simple solution is to get a portable drive and take your backups home, off-site so in the worst-case-scenario you’ve still got a copy of your data.

That’s a great solution, but how secure is your data? if you’ve got your entire business sitting on a portable hard drive, often left on the front seat of your car, it makes it that much easier for anyone to get a hold of that data. Password protecting a zip file is NOT a secure method, and this is where Apricorn’s latest Aegis Padlock 750GB Encrypted Portable Drive comes into play.

The latest Aegis Padlock 750GB Encrypted Portable Drive features Military Grade FIPS PUB 197 Validated Encryption, in both your choice of AES-128bit and now also in AES-256bit, not only is this done in real time, it’s also software independent, meaning you can use this device anywhere you would normally be able to plug a USB hard drive in.

What's it like to use?

Well in my experience, once you've learned how to enter your PIN & Unlock the device it's seamless, it is exactly the same as any other USB portable drive to use in the way that once it's unlocked, it shows up as a normal external hard drive, it's that simple!. It comes pre-formatted in NTFS, so if your're running Windows it will work straight out of the box, but, if your like me and run OSX you have 2 choices, you can either download the NTFS-3G driver or, you can re-format the drive in Disk Utility (it shows up just like any other USB hard drive).

And that’s one of the awesome features with this device, it makes something that sounds hard to do (highly secure encrypted backups), such a simple task to carry out, and gives you the piece of mind that even if you did happen to have the drive get stolen, or you loose it somehow, that no one else is going to be able to use, or see any of your data, and that is brilliant.

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