A Rule Of Thumb Drives

Don’t plug in ones you find:

The thumb drive has long been a weak spot in the overall security landscape. As usual, the problem has a very human face: There is a raft of good policies in place to protect companies from losing data – or gaining viruses and assorted pieces of malware – from USB flash drives. Unfortunately, people are not paying attention. Even IT professionals are not eating their own cooking when it comes to USB security, according to CIO Insight:

In a recent study of 300 IT professionals—many of whom are security experts—conducted at the RSA Conference 2013, 78% admitted to having plugged in a USB flash drive that they’d found lying around. To make matters worse, much of the data discovered on those drives included viruses, rootkits and bot executables.

The story offers a bit of comic relief: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran a test in which staffers dropped flash drives in the parking lot of government and contractor buildings. Sixty percent of folks who picked them up simply plugged them into networked computers. That percentage jumped to 90 percent if the drive had an official logo.

(Hat tip: Geoffrey Ingersoll)