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The Promiscuous USB Key

Autor brendon

I always swore I would never carry a Geek Stick/ USB Key/ Memory Card, or whatever you want to call it. But the convenience of having 1GB of storage in my pocket has proved itself quite useful on many occasions. The other night for example, someone had photo’s from a party on their laptop that I wanted to get a copy of. A simple matter of plug the USB Key in and copy.

It wasn’t until I plugged that USB key into my laptop to upload the photos when Symantec popped up on my screen warning me that there were several infected exe files on the USB key & that the autorun on the key was altered to run one of these files!!! Now I keep a few little useful tools on my key, things I use for work on customer servers from time to time. DiskMon, FileMon, Kablammo, Gadgets, etc. To my horror, all but one of the executable files on my key had been infected with this virus!!!

Years ago, when someone gave you a floppy disk, the first thing you did was virus scan the disk before running any software from it. There was no auto-run to worry about and viruses weren’t very smart back then. You could catch 99% of viruses just by doing this simple quick check. But floppy disks became unpopular and email was the new way to spread viruses. So I like most people got out of the habit of scanning removable media.

We all run firewalls on our PC’s to protect us from nasty computers on shared networks. We update our operating systems and applications to prevent any flaws in coding from providing a virus entry point but I don’t know anyone these days that scan’s their USB key before loading data off it. When you think about it, (Unless you are an ethereal Geek) your USB key is the most promiscuous device you own….

The moral of this story, don’t trust removable media, it’s the oldest trick in the Virus book and appears to be coming back into fashion.