Lenovo is partnering with Utimaco to offer new ThinkPad notebooks with biometrically secured hard drives. Utimaco has integrated their SafeGuard Easy 4.3 program which will encrypt all the entire hard drive with a fingerprint swipe on select ThinkPad notebooks.

SafeGuard will encrypt the drive with either AES (128 or 256-bit) or IDEA encryption. The master boot record is also protected from unwanted changes and backup copies are used if the program detects if anything is wrong. The Utimaco SafeGuard program is available as a separate download for owners of other laptops.

There have been several notable laptop thefts in the past year and there seems to be a new one every other day. Perhaps the most notable was the Department of Veterans Affairs laptop that contained the Social Security numbers of more than 26.5 million U.S. veterans.