Earlier this year a group of researchers from the University of IL, the University of MI and Google published a study confirming that many people would pick up and plug a USB drive of unknown provenance.
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Curiosity has clearly gotten the better of some of the recipients, with a number of them learning to their cost that it’s really not a good idea to plug such an item into a computer if you have no idea where it’s come from.
The devious ploy has now forced Victoria Police to issue a warning, saying “the USB drives are believed to be extremely harmful and members of the public are urged to avoid plugging them into their computers or other devices”.
It’s not yet known who’s behind the mysterious deliveries.
While some crook has found a unique way of distributing banking trojans or who knows what malware, the problem of people blindly plugging USB drives into their computers is not a new one.
Andrew Tierney, consultant at cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners, said the use of infected USB sticks to target households was very rare.
If we were to hazard a guess, though, we’d say that the sticks contain malware that infects a system without the end user realizing. Such malware could pull personal information from a computer before sending it back to the hacker, or lock the computer up until a ransom is paid.
If you found a stray USB stick in your mailbox, could you resist the temptation of picking it up and popping it into your computer to take a look around?
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The force published a photo of some of the unmarked thumb drives it has already recovered from Victorian mailboxes.
