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USB 'Dead Drops'

Posted by Soulskill on from the peer-to-peer-sneakernet dept.

Okian Warrior writes "Aram Bartholl is building a series of USB dead drops in New York City. Billed as 'an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space,' he has embedded USB sticks as file cache devices throughout the city. Bartholl says, 'I am "injecting" USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessible to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your files and data.' Current locations (more to come) include: 87 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, NY (Makerbot), Empire Fulton Ferry Park, Brooklyn, NY (Dumbo), 235 Bowery, NY (New Museum), Union Square, NY (Subway Station 14th St), and West 21st Street, NY (Eyebeam)"

5 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Good way to get your laptop attacked by techmuse · · Score: 5, Informative

    So basically, you are being invited to connect a USB device from an unknown source, with unknown code on it, to your machine. There have been many instances of people leaving USB sticks with exploit binaries around for people to find. You find the stick, stick it in your machine, and are promptly exploited. Regardless of whether the creator of the dead drops hasn't done this intentionally themselves (hopefully, they haven't), you have no idea what might have been placed on the sticks by others.

    1. Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked by techmuse · · Score: 4, Informative

      And here is an article on this exploit technique:

      http://www.dailytech.com/USB+Drive+Malware+Exploit+Windows+7+Flaw+in+Apparent+Espionage+Effort/article19065.htm

  2. Re:Engineering aspects: by MoonBuggy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Basically, this. A very reasonable point, and one that I hadn't considered myself.

  3. Re:cfdisk /dev/sdb; mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 by KibibyteBrain · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hate to break it to you, but the first thing a Windows boxen will do when it is then plugged into the drive then will be prompt the user to format it, NTFS, sort of making this hardly any real fix, and really just more annoying to the projects spirit as whatever pdf of the Anarchist's Cookbook or whatever "contraband" files these kiddies will be spreading at these dead-drops will be deleted twice.

  4. Re:How stupid can you get? by bsDaemon · · Score: 3, Informative

    They really don't have any standards for art anymore, do they?