Attacks on businesses’ most important data keep escalating as hackers get ever more clever at outwitting security software. Now comes a hardware solution that, based on early evaluations, may give the defense a real advantage.

It’s a device from a company called InZero, a box that sits between the PC and the Internet. When you send an email or browse the Web from your desktop, your screen looks like normal.

But actually, it is the InZero device that is intercepting your commands and mirroring them. The device acts as a barrier between malware and other cyber attacks by acting as barrier. Basically, your PC is quarantined from the bad stuff out there.

The OnZero device, which is about the size of a paperback book, has no resident data and no storage device — only hardware and firmware, which cannot be altered by outside attacks.

Initial testing from the U.S. Defense Department and several independent security labs seem to bear out the effectiveness of this approach, according to BusinessWeek. The president and developer of the company has offered to give a new Harley-Davidson to any hacker who could outwit the device — so far, no one’s come forward.

The company is ready to roll out products, with the devices initially costing in the low hundreds of dollars.  Eventually, it is though, such devices could be built into the computers themselves, with much lower costs thanks to volume.  For now, it looks like a promising weapon in the never-ending war against data thieves.

Tags: data security, InZero, OnZero