A new report my McAfee’s research team in Bangalore provides some interesting information on the re-birth of removable storage malware. John Hillman has a look at the details.

This month’s report from our friends in Bangalore, on the latest surge in removable storage malware, made for some pretty interesting reading.

The team explain how, long before we all came to associate viruses exclusively with the internet, floppy disks were the vectors of choice for attackers - under 25s should try to imagine a floppy disk as a square retro-ish looking piece of plastic about the size of a Sunday newspaper and capable of storing about one tenth of the information found therein.

It was no surprise then that once the internet revolutionised the way we sent and received information hackers gave up trying to build Rome with matchsticks and began spreading malicious code via e-mail instead.

Today, however, our removable storage devices, from digital picture frames to MP3s, are capable of storing more than 10,000 times more data than your old floppy ever dreamed of. So, it’s not really surprising that virus authors are once again beginning to recognize the potential of our plug-ins as an excellent means of randomly ruining everybody’s day.

This vector is being aided and abetted by our old friend AutoRun, because it automatically launches the content on a plug-in device without any prompting from the unsuspecting victim. Furthermore, many of today’s devices also happen to be what’s known as “smart”, meaning that they can run portable software programmes and boot operating systems.

The last few years have apparently been good for malware authors who use AutoRun to deliver their malicious payloads, with some truly worrying successes. A lot of this has been thanks to slack quality-control practices by hardware manufacturers, which caused many devices such as USB sticks, Picture Frames and MP3s to be sold to consumers with AutoRun malware preinstalled.

Such has been their success that the U.S. military was forced to try and ban removable storage devices, a task made virtually impossible by the necessities of troops in the field. But the most shocking aspect of the report has to be news that an astronaut on the International Space Station allowed a worm to boldly go where no worm has been before by taking a laptop with an infected USB drive with him on a space mission. Apparently he didn’t have any malware protection on his laptop, which could have prevented the infection; I mean, come on, it’s hardly rocket science is it?

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Image Credit: Calil Souza