Tags: hackers, personal computer, security, thumb drives, usb drives
Hackers always are on the lookout for the most vulnerable spot on your personal computers. These days, that weakest link might be your flash thumb drive.
Thumb drives — which can fit gigabytes of documents, music and video on a stick about the size of a pack of gum — are a convenient way to shuffle files among different computers. They plug into your computer’s universal serial bus port and appear as a hard drive on your PC.
Their growing popularity, huge storage capacity and ability to load a computer’s essential system files makes them an inviting target for hackers, too.
ThreatSense.Net, the malware monitoring site run by antivirus software maker Eset, found that 10.3% of recent malware detections involved programs trying to take advantage of thumb drives and other removable media.
Read more from Yahoo! News
July 14th, 2008 at 4:41 am
That’s why a lot of virus right now uses autorun.inf and install it on thumb drives to spread itself.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:48 am
scary news. though i have long heard of it, it still scares me what these viruses can do to my pc.
July 14th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I’d never thought of my flash drive as my achilles heel. Thanks for the heads up.
July 15th, 2008 at 3:05 am
wow, i learned something new today. Thanks for that wonderful info.
July 15th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Geez, I wish people had something better to do than to go around destroying other peoples stuff. If it’s hard to crack one thing, they just find another thing to crack. Why don’t they use their brains for something productive?
I’ll do my part and make sure to teach my baby that hacking isn’t nice.
~Teresa
http://www.naturalbabybiz.com
July 16th, 2008 at 9:38 am
My God have these hackers nothing better to do?!
July 16th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
The latest Windows Servers (via Group Policies), XP (via registry tweak) and Vista allow for “read only” access to flash drives – this makes it harder for people to steal data. Disabling autorun on ALL media (CD’s, flash drives, external USB drives, etc.), is advisable too. A flash drive can be a great toolkit for black and white hats alike.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:42 am
Whoa, interesting post. How to avoid this and ensure the flash drive is ok?
July 20th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
ughhh. hackers suck!
July 22nd, 2008 at 1:35 am
Nice info. I must take my removable disk carefully
July 30th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Very eye-opening. Nothings safe anymore. Geez.
July 31st, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Dang, and I thought wearing my thumb drive around my neck was cool….it just goes to show you that while you are innocently living your life doing your thing, someone is plotting evil….oooohhhh scary! Good info..submitted it to Entreview…here’s to more traffic!!
April 9th, 2009 at 8:47 am
People are so quick to judge. Flash drive are not to blame for the influx of virus attcks. U3 smart drives maybe, but not flash drives in general. This is why Hackers like myself cannot stand the average person with access to a computer!