Most customers have heard about data breaches that have cost companies millions of dollars, often due to the release of protected personally identifiable information that is often regulated. However, embedded customers have a lot of technical information and intellectual property that could cost them millions or open their devices for breaches, ranging from product schematics, software, CAD/CAM processes, and related information. Providing a quick summary of the best protection in storage is first: always-on, hardware-based encryption is a type of implementation that is much more secure than no encryption or software encryption. Software encryption may be hacked with free or paid tools available on the internet and can be removed just by reformatting a storage device. The second main focus is brute-force attack protection. Hardware-encrypted drives implement the security protocol entirely inside the drive. Brute-force attack protection prevents the continuous guessing of passwords. On these drives, some passwords will get locked after 10 re-tries and when a limit of re-tries is reached on all passwords, the drive will reset to factory state and crypto-erase all data. Finally, there is BadUSB protection. This is the newest attack method that was described by an FBI warning to businesses in January 2022. A criminal gang was replacing the firmware on a standard USB drive and sending or giving drives to employees of companies. These drives, when plugged into logged-in systems, would register as a keyboard and start attacking the cybersecurity from the inside. An attacker could even drop drives outside the company entrance and an employee could pick it up and plug it in their corporate system to “see if it works or who owns it”. Once inside the firewall, these drives could inject malware or ransomware and there is no guarantee that malware software on the client system would detect this attack. BadUSB protection is done by digitally signing the USB firmware with RSA 2048 bit, a very strong encryption method. Then, when the USB drive boots up, it uses a public key to check the firmware. If the firmware does not pass this test, the USB drive becomes non-functional. There are also device- and OS-independent (operating system) options. In embedded use cases, devices may not have the ability to run launchers for Windows or macOS. The OS-independent drives, such as keypad drives, can be unlocked by the user and then the device can recognize them as standard USB mass storage.