Ironkey is not immune from being hacked. It has a hardware encryption system with some neat features though. It protects from being brute forced because it securely erases your encryption key if too many bad attempts are made. It also is filled with encapsulation material and has a metal skin, to make it difficult to get to the encrypted key without damaging it and erasing it from memory, although (ex)military hackers have gotten around systems like this before: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10625082&pnum=0 Ironkey is a nice high quality thumb drive with built in encryption and some nice difficult to defeat physical security features, but it is not the completely unhackable magic device you are making it out to be. It is FIPS140-2 level two certified, but the military probably uses level 4 certified stuff mostly. Anything without physical intrusion detection features can only get level 1 certification, level 4 needs to be able to detect any potential physical intrusion.