Two-Thirds of Lost USB Drives Carry Malware 196
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."
What do you expect .. (Score:5, Funny)
.. they were lost by the 10% of commuters stupid enough to lose an USB stick.
I can't believe that many people... (Score:5, Funny)
... carry acroread.exe and/or iexplore.exe around on their USB sticks.
Weird.
Safe USB (Score:5, Funny)
I practice safe USB plugging. I put a rubber cover over my USB stick before I try to plug it in to anything. I have never once caught a virus on it.
Re:I can't believe that many people... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm more inclined to think that the trains in Australia are carrying viruses and simply infect the USB sticks on contact.
Re:Mac (Score:4, Funny)
... which unfortunately doesn't really tell us anything, since they don't mention how many of the uninfected storage devices were like that.
Yes they did, and then the guy you replied to did also.
It was seven. Were you looking for digits? 7.
Re:Mac (Score:5, Funny)
FTA
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.
Which means that those USB drives had been plugged in to a Windows machine at least once.
Re:Truecrypt? (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks.
I guess the old adage still applies...
"Careful where you stick that thing, son..."
Re:Mac (Score:4, Funny)
We have a winner!
Re:Truecrypt? (Score:5, Funny)
how would they know if some sort of stenography was being implemented
You are correct. There is no known way to detect which files were transcribed in shorthand by a person taking dictation before being entered by keyboard...
Oh, wait, you meant "steganography", didn't you?
Re:On purpose (Score:3, Funny)
Dude. Stop with the brain hurt.
Clearly, people got these because they are dumb. We know that they are dumb because they ride public transit. They ride public transit because they are poor. Dumb, poor, train people got sticks without understanding what they were for. They probably tried to eat them and left them in the train.
Because they're dumb, poor, non-computer people.
QED.
Now I have to go catch a train home.
Want to bet? (Score:3, Funny)
I find it hard to believe that none of the folks who turned in "lost" USB sticks took a minute to check if there was any hot pr0n on them first.