Slashdot Mirror
Two-Thirds of Lost USB Drives Carry Malware
itwbennett writes "Antivirus firm Sophos acquired a passel of USB sticks lost by commuters on trains in the Greater Sydney metro area at an auction organized by the Rail Corporation New South Wales. The company analyzed 50 USB sticks and found that not a single one was encrypted and 33 of them were infected with at least one type of malware."
One interesting aspect of the results was that based on their data and formatting seven of the infected storage devices belonged to Mac OS X users or had been extensively used under this OS.
The whole point of portable USB sticks is to access your data from strange computers. Plugging an encrypted USB stick into a strange computer completely defeats the point of the encryption. None of my USB sticks are encrypted; they don't need to be because they have no personal information on them.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
TrueCrypt does not make invisible containers. It makes encrypted containers.
There is an exception for the container hidden in an container, but that only offers plausible deniability as the existence of the larger container is obvious.
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
Conclusions you can draw from this study: people who ride transit and lose their USB memory stick while doing so are
(a) unlikely to encrypt the contents of their memory stick, and
(b) prone to malware infections
I'm not certain that this group is representative of the general population, however.
licet differant, aequabitur
This isn't lost USB sticks - this is USB sticks that were lost and weren't reclaimed long enough to end up in a transit authority auction.
Auctioning these thing seems the height of irresponsibility. I wonder what legal ramifications there are for the Rail Corporation in releasing private information, (even if accidentally lost) to total strangers.
From TFA:
he Sophos researchers found personal information belonging to the former owners of the devices, as well as their families, friends and colleagues. The recovered files included images, documents, source code, audio files, video files, XML files and even AutoCAD drawings.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That hadn't occurred to me. I wonder if the study included a security audit of the CityRail computers?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Feynman
My thoughts exactly.
None of these (256 meg to 8 Gig) were so valuable that their destruction would have been considered a huge waste, and the potential damage to the forgetful owner could be massive. You would think that the LEAST they could do was format them, which itself is far from fool proof. But releasing them intact just seems dumb, even if not illegal.
he Sophos researchers found personal information belonging to the former owners of the devices, as well as their families, friends and colleagues. The recovered files included images, documents, source code, audio files, video files, XML files and even AutoCAD drawings.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Anti-virus vendor says there's yet another way to get a virus, and you need their product even more. Film at eleven.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
It seems likely that people who are careless also lose things more often.
100% of items handed in, have been handed in -- what a surprise! How do they track lost items that were not handed in? This is as accurate as Gracie Allen's telephone poll -- 100% of people she phoned, had a phone.