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Yet Another "People Plug In Strange USB Sticks" Story
Bruce Schneier's blog has a bit about a subject that gets my blood boiling too. He says "I'm really getting tired of stories like this: Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers... People get USB sticks all the time. The problem isn't that people are idiots... The problem is that the OS trusts random USB sticks."
AutoRun!
But seriously, I'd check out the data on a stick I picked up. I'm a Linux user so at least I wouldn't have the autorun issue, but a mysterious piece of software I may try running in Wine or a VM so I could just as well have fallen victim.
The problem isn't that people are idiots, but that doesn't preclude people from being idiots being a problem.
You can never make systems fully foolproof through technology, and Bruce of all people should know this.
It's the goal of the engineers to build better foolproof equipment, and it's the goal of nature to build better fools.
Someone needs to start dropping USB sticks that physically destroy hardware when plugged in. Overclock video cards 30%. Issue ATA nuke commands. Scribble over optical drive firmware. Flash the BIOS with a LMOS bootloader. Maybe then people will realise that You Do Not Fucking Do This.
No, they won't. They'll blame the people who dropped the USB sticks, and thinking in black and white because they seem unable to do otherwise, they would think that means that they themselves are not also to blame.
Just look at how people have reacted to this spring's exploits of web sites and services. They don't blame the companies that had lax security, and they don't blame themselves for choosing idiot passwords or not cancelling services they no longer use.
Well, I mean, I'm not going to risk MY computer to some random virus infection. Of course I'm going to use an office computer!
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
The behavior is quite logical, once you understand what the objective is. Usually the way we look at this is from the POV of corporation/corporate IT security. They find this behavior "stupid" - it potentially harms corporate systems. But consider that an individual employee quite likely cares very little for the well being of corporate IT system or corporation in general (why - is another story). He may be interested to find out what's on the USB device (could be something valuable, you never know) and at the same time he probably wouldn't want to harm his personal computer at home. Hence - using it at work, where if this turns out to be something nasty - it's someone elses problem. And if IT asks - 100% of the time he'll say that he did not do any such thing :)
People are not idiots, they just have their own objectives that are not very well aligned with yours.
autorun is NOT the only problem.
The most insidious thing I have seen in this department is little usb sticks that are built into advertising. When inserted, they just act like a keyboard instead of removable media. On windows, it opened up my Run dialog and typed in the URL of the site the advertiser wanted me to go to. With me logged in as an admin, just imagine what else it could have typed into that box.
Wow, i found a USB stick once on a college campus, looked like a nice one so i plugged it into a computer to see if i could find who's it was so i could return it to them. I didn't realize that i deserved having my computer fried for trying to return something. Do you put mace in your wallet so that if you drop it and someone tries to return it that it sprays them in the face?
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6UIrdLAkFM
Part2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osF6FS2KS_E
Rule #1 -- If you're going to narrate a video, get a personality. Seriously, I had to turn it off after the first minute because it was so boring.
And despite attitudes like that, people still wonder why those Nazis in corporate IT do things like disallowing USB mass storage devices, filtering HTTP traffic through a proxy, etc.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
I really feel for your situation. That said, I'm still going to trust people. I trust people knowing that that trust could blow up in my face at any time; that's just a risk one takes. I will continue to trust people because without trust, there is only suspicion and paranoia, and I don't really want to live in a world where paranoia rules anyway.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Okay, so what should you do with it? You want to return it to its owner, and examining its contents is the obvious way to find the owner.
You should be able to trust your computer to let you look at what's on a USB stick. Otherwise, you can't:
- trust files that your colleague is giving you via USB
- trust a USB stick distributed as a promotion
- trust your own USB stick, if you've used it to give a presentation on someone else's computer.
Obviously, you shouldn't run programs on the stick, and you should know that lots of document formats are really programs, but you should be able to trust your computer to show you the contents without running everything on it.
You know what? Fuck that. I'm not going to let the fact that there are bad people out there make me live my life in fear. For every robber/rapist/murderer out there, there are probably between a hundred and a thousand people who just need a few minutes of your time to help with a flat tire. I'll take my chances. The world has *not* changed. You've allowed the media and a tragic event to convince you that the world has changed. There have always been bad people. There have always been good people. There have always been the vast majority of people who are just going to get along. I choose how I live my life, not some asshole who thinks a gun makes him powerful.
Doesn't mean be stupid. If the news is reporting a "Flat tire robber", maybe you want to adjust your behavior for a while, but in general I'm going to help people who need help. I've lived my life that way for 37 years and I'm not changing it now. I've lived in downtown New Orleans. I spent a year in Iraq. The bad guys haven't made me bitter and fearful yet, I'm not going to let them do it now.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Guns and sledgehammers don't reveal their owners as a strong potential consequence of use. Hitting something with a hammer isn't going to tell you whose hammer it is. Opening "resume.doc" on a USB stick is likely to net you not only a name, but an address, e-mail, and phone number.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Is there any kind of device that can be used to ensure you are only presented with a mass storage drive?
I'm thinking of something like a small adapter where you plug the USB "drive" in one end and the other in to your computer. The device could intercept and reprocess the communication so that anything that is not a standard drive would not get through. That would be nice to have because these days you never know what hardware is really in a seemingly standard looking USB drive. At the rate things are going we might need something like this built in to motherboards.
Also, I actually bought a couple of genuine Sandisk 1gb "U3" flash drives a while back at Microcenter. When inserted on a Windows XP machine it presented itself as both a standard drive AND a CD drive - that autoruns some useless preloaded windows software. (In some work environments just letting it run this hopefully harmless but unauthorized software would be enough to get someone in trouble.) Actually had to download and run a special program just to remove this garbage, and it wipes the flash drive in the process. So yes, even a legitimate commercial flash drive can be hiding stuff.
Judging by the contents of my own key drives, there is almost never any user-identifiable information on these things. Any "I was just trying to see who's it was" argument is probably just cover for "I wanted a free key drive and didn't think to format it before I used it..."
Judging by the content of my own key drives, most people watch too much porn.
I love these stories that have details that, if the story were actually true, no one would actually know.