A Japanese start-up has come up with a mutant piece of hardware that it says may deliver "perfect security" for Web servers: a two-headed hard disk drive. Tokyo-based Scarabs has developed a prototype of the hard drive, which has a read-only. . .
A Japanese start-up has come up with a mutant piece of hardware that it says may deliver "perfect security" for Web servers: a two-headed hard disk drive. Tokyo-based Scarabs has developed a prototype of the hard drive, which has a read-only head and a read-write head. The Web server can only read from the drive, theoretically making it impossible for attackers to deface the site or otherwise modify data.

For updating the site, an internal PC can be connected to the drive via the read-write head. "Each head works independently, so no synchronous control between two heads is needed," the company stated on its Web site.

Scarabs hopes to have a version of the device on the market this year.

The drive is an unusual response to the growing problem of online security, particularly with large businesses, whose Web servers are subject to a constant bombardment of attacks, according to security experts. UK systems integrator Mi2g recently said it had monitored more than 9,000 successful attacks on Microsoft Internet Information Server-based systems alone for the first half of this year.

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