Chiba, Japan-based technology company Scarabs has announced a two-headed, hard drive that it describes as essentially "hack-proof." While the two-headed drive can prevent a cyber-attack in which hackers deface a web site or alter information in a database, it does not prevent a hacker from gaining unauthorized access to, or copying information from an online database.

All disk drives contain a "head" that reads and writes information to the hard disk (much like the "heads" of a tape recorder). Traditional hard drives combine the ability to read information from a disk and write information onto a disk into a single "head." The unique feature of the Scarabs drive is the installation of a second head that can only "read" information from the disk.

Users connecting to a computer containing Scarabs' two-headed drive access the hard drive via the "read-only" head. The visitor can receive any data (e.g. web page) from the computer, but because this head does not have the capability to write data to the hard drive, the visitor cannot add information to the hard drive (e.g. deface/hijack the web site).

The second head is a traditional read/write head that is accessible by the computer's owner. This head lets the user access and write information to the hard drive as they would on any other machine.

Scarabs currently has a patent pending on the technology.