With more and more entertainment content being released as ‘special edition’ USB flash drives, here are two of the more extreme examples of drive packaging that have been announced this week.

First, here’s a submachine gun-shaped drive for US rap group Get Busy Committee’s new album, released later this month.  And here’s a special edition 4GB drive for the home release of the latest Star Trek movie.

The good news is, with designs as striking as these, users are much less likely to lose them.  However, the temptation to use the huge capacities of the drives to store personal data is also strong.  Despite the novelty and the wow-factor, we would advise keeping such special drives for entertainment only, and using a secure flash drive for any business or sensitive personal data.

One of the largest thefts of credit card details was revealed last week by web services provider Network Solutions, when it disclosed that hackers broke into its servers and stole details of over 573,000 debit and credit card accounts from its customers.

The company discovered in early June that its servers had been hacked into by unknown parties.  The servers provide e-commerce services such as Web site hosting and payment processing to nearly 4,500 small to mid-size online stores.

Worse, the hackers left behind malicious code, which allowed them to intercept financial information from people who made purchases at the online stores hosted on those servers from March to June 09.

While we often focus on data losses and leaks through lost or stolen portable storage devices, it’s a useful reminder that there are other attack vectors too.