Wednesday, July 31, 2013

How to cyber defeat an enemy?

Don't touch that flash drive—you have no idea where it's been.

This Slate article starts:
If you found a pretty little USB stick on the ground, would you plug it in to see what’s there? No? OK, what do you think your parents, neighbors, and co-workers would do?
When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran a similar test in 2011, they discovered that 60 percent of those who found flash drives planted outside of government and contractor buildings plugged them right into their networked computers. Even worse, when the drives were outfitted with an official logo, the number jumped to 90 percent.

Well, maybe those people weren’t properly trained in cyber security, you might say. (Insert joke about incompetent government workers.) Alas, a recent study divulged that 78 percent of IT security professionals confessed to experimenting with unidentified flash drives. Of those surveyed, more than 68 percent had been personally responsible for a security breach at work or home, often as a result of the orphaned drives.
Gee.  Sounds like all you need to do to cyber defeat an enemy is to have agents with sacks full of virus infected USB drives discretely dropping them around government buildings.   And just around the neighbourhood generally, perhaps.

Or maybe you could use a drone to disperse them from the air....

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