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We all know the risks (or do we?) of plugging things into a PC such as flash drives storage cards and disks, I recently had an issue where one of my directors had plugged a brand new (sealed) USB drive into his laptop copied a couple of spreadsheets onto the drive to transfer them to his desktop PC.

On plugging the USB drive into his main pc our security (NOD32 by Eset) kicked in and locked down a ‘known threat’ this was kind of disturbing as I knew the drive was brand new (i gave it to him sealed) It seems the code that was infecting the drive was silently installing from his unprotected laptop and writing hidden files that executed the next time it was plugged into any machine. After some headscratching and scanning we got to the root of the problem and disinfected all machines/drives affected.

this took me on to read the following article which was again quite shocking:

Viruses found in photo frames, chargers

Computer viruses are so clever they are always finding new ways to break into our computers.

Over the past few weeks viruses have been spread to computers from digital photo frames, battery chargers and even brand new smart phones.

What all of the devices have in common is that they are plugged into the USB port of your computer, which gives the virus an opportunity to go forth and multiply to cause havoc.

In the case of the phone it was found to contain no less than three viruses, including a Mariposa bot virus which “phones home” for more instructions once it lands in a computer.

No less an authority than the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team put out a warning about a common USB battery charger which came with optional software that contained a Trojan that allowed a hacker to remotely control a computer.

It is not known how many users have been infected by that software, which may have been around for three years.

The photo frames suffer from a similar back door hacker entry problem, which seems to stem from a period in which the viruses were particularly active around the world.

None of the distribution was wilful and stemmed from infected computers in the manufacturer accidentally passing on the viruses.

“This may simply be from that time frame when all the factories in China were not clean and many were putting malware on to stuff, not intentionally but because the hygiene wasn’t good,” said Marcus Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Centre.

“Who knows where the server (hosting the software) is located. It could have been exposed to the unclean conditions that were rampant there.”

Fortunately most good virus protection programs seem to pick up and eradicate these threats because they have long been identified as a problem.

These examples do show how careful you need to be with any device that can be plugged into a computer.

Article from: News.com.au

Be aware that everything you can attach to a computer can be affected by malicious code keep you AV solution up to date (as well as your operating system!)