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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: April 17, 2016

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REAL LIFE NEWS: PEOPLE WHO FIND A USB DRIVE IN THE PARKING LOT PLUG IT IN HALF THE TIME

by Hazed

If you found a memory stick lying in the carpark, would you pick it up, take it inside, and plug it into your computer?

If your answer to that is, “wow, yes, of course I would – it’s a free memory stick!” then you are not alone, because a new study has found that almost half of people would do just that.

The problem, of course, is that it’s incredibly unsafe to do so. The stick might have malware on it, or some kind of Trojan software that will allow hackers to get into your machine.

Google researchers teamed up with two universities to test out how people would react. They scattered 297 USB drives around the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. The sticks contained HTML files which had embedded img tags leading to images on a remote server, so the researchers could tell when the files were opened.

48% of the USBs were picked up and plugged into a computer – some of them within minutes of being dropped.

What’s more, only 16% of those who picked up the drives bothered to scan them with anti-virus software before loading the files.

When questioned later, the users mostly said they were acting out of altruism: they were only accessing the drive to try and find the owner. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Whatever their motives, the researchers have concluded that an attacker would have no trouble at all in spreading malware in an organisation. “The security community has long held the belief that users can be socially engineered into picking up and plugging in seemingly lost USB flash drives they find,” the researchers reported this month. Unfortunately, whether driven by altruistic motives or human curiosity, the user unknowingly opens their organization to an internal attack when they connect the drive – a physical Trojan horse.”

You have been warned!

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/11/half_plug_in_found_drives/

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