LG, one of Korea’s leading industry giants has announced the release of its Vaccine Flash Disk which will come in 512 to 8 Gigabyte models. The said hardware based protection is the company’s bet at getting it’s fair share of the Consumer Electronics market mainly in the computing industry. The said flash disk is pre-loaded with an anti-virus, malware protection which scans the system it is connected to removing and preventing further infection. The concept of hardware based malware protection has been in the works for quite sometime with motherboards that have anti-virus protection and hard disks that do the same. Flash disks have replaced the good old floppy in being the most prolific means of spreading of malware on earth. Being discreet and having ever larger capacities, they have been involved in infecting innocent computers and networks to corporate espionage and identity theft for their portability and small footprint being their worst trait.
Viruses and malware have long wreaked havoc on the computing industry since they were created in the 80’s and today’s viruses have gotten so sophisticated that even the FBI, CIA and other security and law enforcement agencies have become involved setting up their respective IT crimes divisions. The law has also caught up with steeper penalties and fines to offenders who do intentionally infect and create these malicious code that have caused millions of dollars in lost business revenue all over the globe. We should expect more of these hardware based-protection systems in the coming future for they might be the only way to protect media and other vulnerable Information Technology resources from attack.
