USB 'Dead Drops'

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)"

Comments

Yeeeahhh

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn off AutoPlay first, kids. You'll thank me later.

Re:Yeeeahhh

[HungryHobo]

Ya I would have thought an open wifi network connected to a little ftp server (but for fun not the internet)would make a far better dead drop.
for one you wouldn't have to be so obvious about connecting to it.
Sitting in a coffee shop across the street would be far less conspicuous.

Dead drops?

[nebaz]

Is that kind of like a Glory Hole? Probably the same number of viruses.

Re:Cool

[MoonBuggy]

5 free usb drives, where's my bike?

No longer where you left it, since a passerby though 'hey, a free bike'.

Excellent

[427_ci_505]

I can think of no security issues that could be introduced by this development.

a new trend

[tverbeek]

For an encore, he'll be setting up "Drop Dead" sites around the city. These will be little knobs mounted to walls, for anonymous people to "share" biological materials by walking up to them and licking them.

Good way to get your laptop attacked

[techmuse]

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.

Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked

[techmuse]

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

Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked

[Arancaytar]

What kind of crappy machine is vulnerable to files on an external medium?

It's not the nineties anymore.

Re:Good way to get your laptop attacked

[LWATCDR]

Umm.. I guess you didn't read about the Stuxnet worm that used several zero day USB based explotes including a buffer overrun in lnk files.
Last I heard not all of those where patched so if you are using a windows machine odds are you are.
Also if one was to be really nasty they would hack a microcontroller to be a keyboard and then hijack your machine that way.

Re:Cool

[bennomatic]

Then a tow truck came by and said, "Hey, free taxi!"

Geocache much?

[dismorphic]

Sounds an awful lot like a high(er?) tech version of a geocache to me. Somebody should post these to geocaching.com and suggest a new style of cache... a data cache.

Re:Cool

[Andy Smith]

Then a tow truck came by and said, "Hey, free taxi!"

Then Optimus Prime came by and said, "Longarm? Are you free?"

Re:Sounds great!

[djdavetrouble]

kudos to the person who will find them all and format to ext4 file system.

awesome post, but since it is almost halloween, why not a killer file system like reiserfs?

Re:Engineering aspects:

[MoonBuggy]

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

Re:Cool

[AndreR]

And then two dozen ./ users came by and said, "Hey, free karma!"

Re:Cool

[Haedrian]

That could get you on the sex offender's list

Directory Listing

[Penguinshit]

goatse.jpg

Copy of goatse.jpg

Copy2 of goatse.jpg

Copy3 of goatse.jpg

...

It's like the 70's and 80's

[WED Fan]

...its like the era of near anonymous sex, eventually people started dying after hooking up. How long before we see people killing their computers, or going to jail because they plugged in and xferred something really illegal?

This is REALLY smart.

Re:How stupid can you get?

[dangitman]

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

I hear the ISO is considering the issue, but if you want swifter action, I suggest you submit an RFC to the IETF.

Re:My grading of this idea:

[cerberusss]

Okay, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah? -- Douglas Adams