ComputerWorld - Defensive Computing: Test your defenses against malicious USB flash drives

January 24, 2009
by Michael Horowitz

The latest malicious software to spread to untold millions of computers goes by the names Downadup and Conficker. Computerworld's Gregg Keizer calls its spread the "biggest attack in years".

One way the software spreads is by infecting USB flash drives (a.k.a. thumb drives, pen drives, flash drives, memory sticks, etc).

This is certainly not the first malicious worm to spread by infecting flash drives.

A couple months ago, the Department of Defense dealt with a variant of the SillyFDC worm known as Agent.btz by banning the use of USB flash drives on government computers. In September 2008, a computer on board the International Space Station was infected with malicious software that spread via a flash drive. In December 2007, Randy Abrams at ESET, the company behind the NOD32 antivirus program, wrote that "Trojans using autorun to infect computers have been one of the most prevalent threats that we have been seeing for several months now." And I'll never forget this 2006 story, Social Engineering, the USB Way, about how a company was infected by malicious thumb drives dropped in the parking lot outside their office.

Here I'll show the tricks used by malicious software on USB flash drives and provide a safe sample file that can be used to test how well a computer is defended from the tricks that the bad guys use.

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