USB flash drives are far too handy these days, which means they are pretty easily stolen (or lost… or even just the cap). If you’re backing up your term paper or some goofy holiday pictures on these things, it’s not that big of a deal if you happen to misplace it, but if you’re hoarding government secrets or other hush-hush material, you had better get a handle on things.

Simple passwords may not be good enough, because someone could just keep plugging away until they “figure out” what it is: but they won’t be able to use the “brute force attack” on the Kingston Data Traveler Elite Privacy Edition. If someone attempts to access your data and incorrectly inputs the password on 25 consecutive tries (that is a lot of guesses, though), this thumb drive will explode… Okay, maybe not, but it will erase all the data it’s storing.

There’s 4GB of storage on board: plenty of space for plenty of secrets. However, if the data is really that important, couldn’t the thief physically hack open this thing and take the memory chip?