As part of the so-called viral marketing campaign for the new Nine Inch Nails CD, USB flash drives containing previews of some of the tracks were left in various locations, including a bathroom at the Portugal venue in which the band played.  Not a bad idea:  who doesn’t want a free USB flash drive, and if it has some hotly anticipated music on it which nobody else has – well, that’s the kind of stuff that gets people talking.  Especially emo music fans.  

But before you go on a hunting expedition for these things, consider this:  the campaign hasn’t escaped the notice of crackers, and some of them are already at work exploiting it.  

Some flash drives loaded with malware were recently left in a London parking garage, in the hopes that the finders would take them home, stick them in their PCs and get infected.  The malware in question is a Trojan which steals banking site login information;  this kind of software is pretty big business, sold mostly through Russian websites for $2000 to $5000 a pop.  That sounds like a lot, but if you can slip this stuff onto the PCs of just a few wealthy people, you can get a pretty hefty return on your investment when you clean out their bank accounts.  

So, just as it’s not a great idea to chow down on candy bars you find lying in the gutter, you should think twice before you load anything from unknown or questionable sources on your PC, no matter how benign it looks.  I don’t go around looking for stray USB flash drives, but if I did, they wouldn’t be getting anywhere near any of my production PCs:  they’d be getting tested first on the old junker which doesn’t have an Internet connection – better known as the sandbox.  You never know when a little paranoia’s going to come in handy.  

Read more at The Register.

Thats like the time I bought a USB drive at Costco, plugged it in and found it was full of software.  Apparently it was U3 enabled, but I P'd me off to plug in a drive and unexpectedly have programs start to run.

It took me under an hour to Google a remedy & get a blank USB device like I thought I was purchasing.

Quoted from Glen_Quagmire

Thats like the time I bought a USB drive at Costco, plugged it in and found it was full of software.

Oh, I hear ya.  The only way I can legally reinstall Windows on my Toshiba notebook (aside from buying yet another copy of Windows) is to use the auto-recovery disc, which also installs five metric tons of trialware crap, and then I have to spend a lot of time uninstalling all of it.  Gah.

Where's my baseball bat?  I need to go on a rampage.

For U3 on flash drive removal, go here:

http://www.u3.com/uninstall

BEST brands (at least 1 GB) ARE:

-Lexar
-Sandisk