Study Finds Malware-Ridden Flash Drives Are Amazingly Irresistible

If you’re waiting on a bus and you see a flash drive on a bench, what do you do? What you should do is leave it right where you found it. It could be filled with malware that will be let loose on your device as soon as you pop it in the machine.

Sometimes, it’s better not to be a Good Samaritan and try to find the owner of something. That is the case in this scenario. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case with the general public. A study by technology certificate provider CompTIA found that nearly 20% of people that saw that lonely flash drive on the bench would stick in their computers. This is not advised.

To get to the numbers, CompTIA left 200 unbranded, rigged flash drives littered across four major U.S. cities. They were left in high traffic, public locations. Those who did try to read them proceeded to open the files on it, click on random links, or send email messages to addresses they found on the drives.

Nothing should ever be attached to any device unless you either know for sure it’s safe or unless. A 2011 study by Sophos found that in an auction of lost items by a major transit authority, 66% of the USB drives were infected with malware. A scary fact is that you may not have to perform any action to download malware other than plug it into the computer.

Age is a factor in risk-taking in this case. The study also found that 42% of Millennials have had a work device infected with a virus in a two-year period. Only 32% have had this happen overall. Twenty-seven percent of Millennials have had personal identifiable information (PII) breached with the past two years, and 40% of Millennials are likely to pick up that abandoned USB stick compared to 22% of Gen X and 9% of Baby Boomers.

A lesson here is that there are a lot of people out there who want to spread malware (remember that 66% stat from the transit auction). So always assume that if something is left on a bench in a park, it’s probably not filled with family photos. It’s more likely rigged up to put malware on your device. So, just don’t touch it.