25% of Worms Spread Via USB

An anonymous reader writes "In 2010, 25 percent of new worms have been specifically designed to spread through USB storage devices connected to computers, according to PandaLabs. This distribution technique is highly effective. With survey responses from more than 10,470 companies across 20 countries, it was revealed that approximately 48 percent of SMBs (with up to 1,000 computers) admit to having been infected by some type of malware over the last year. As further proof, 27 percent confirmed that the source of the infection was a USB device connected to a computer."

Comments

PS -- a little more googling shows...

[mcgrew]

If you're running Windows 7 it appears that you're ok. But what took MS so long to fix this gaping hole?

Re:PS -- a little more googling shows...

[VGPowerlord]

To their credit, they fixed this in Windows XP.

Yes, XP. Specifically, Windows XP SP2.

It no longer just runs the Autorun program, but instead gives you a dialog that asks what you want to do, with some default choices. The former Autorun command appears at the top of said list.

The only thing Windows 7 did was remove said dialog when you attach non-optical media.

Re:No, really?

[TheRaven64]

I don't remember any worms spreading automatically via serial port. It would have been difficult, because there weren't many peripherals that had internal storage space and connected via RS-232, and computers connected with a null-modem cable typically had to run some custom software for file transfer.

I do, however, remember a lot of worms spreading via floppy disks. Boot sector viruses were especially common in the DOS days. If you let a floppy in the drive, the BIOS would try to boot from it the next time you turned your computer on. It was quite common for a worm to install itself on the boot sector of any inserted floppy so that when you booted from that floppy it installed itself on the hard drive and then printed a 'please eject floppy and reboot' type error. You'd eject the floppy and reboot, and the machine would start normally, only now you'd be infected.

Since USB drives have replaced floppy disks for offline file transfer, it's not surprising that this is a common attack vector.