VICTORINOX - NEW RELEASE

Victorinox, the family company behind the famed Swiss Army Knife, has launched a pioneering memory stick design at an event held at its European flagship store on London’s New Bond Street.

The device is, says the company, the most secure of its kind available to the public. It uses several layers of security including fingerprint identification and a thermal sensor - so that the finger alone, detached from the body, will still not give access to the memory stick’s contents. The Victorinox Secure has also been made tamper-proof. Any attempt to forcibly open it triggers a self-destruct mechanism that irrevocably burns its CPU and memory chip. Victorinox says it is so confident of its new product’s elite security standards that it offered a £100,000 prize to a team of professional hackers if they could break into it during the two hours the launch event lasted. The money went uncollected. The event was attended by Victorinox’s CEO Carl Elsener Jr. and the Victorinox Secure’s designer Martin Kuster, a technology security specialist. “Life is becoming more digital every day,” says Kuster. “And yet people do so little to protect their data. The world’s most common password is ‘12345’ - and even encryption can be broken given time.” A new version of the device, which will employ e-paper to give users a read-out of its contents, is already in the pipeline. “We wanted to create not only a product for today’s modern lifestyle but a new generation of memory stick that had all the values of functionality and reliability that the iconic Swiss Army Knife has come to represent” says Carl Elsener Jr. “We think of the Victorinox Secure as the digital Swiss Army Knife.”