Cybersecurity expert warns about the dangers of using other people's flash drives

Connecting someone else's flash drive to a computer can lead to infection of the device, said technical director of the Stakhanovets company and information security expert Sergei Shcherbakov.

The most dangerous scenario for the device is BadUSB, when the microcontroller inside the flash drive pretends to be a keyboard and enters commands at a speed of thousands of characters per second.

The only safe rule: if the flash drive is not yours, do not connect it, it is better to ask to send the files via the cloud or messenger.

MOSCOW, September 25 - RIA Novosti. Connecting someone else's flash drive to a computer is one of the riskiest actions, which can lead to infection of the device, said technical director of the Stakhanovets company, information security expert Sergei Shcherbakov.

“There may be a file on the flash drive that is perceived as a command to run the program immediately after connecting. You simply insert the flash drive, and the malicious code is already executed,” Shcherbakov told Gazeta.Ru.

According to him, the flash drive gets direct access to the file system at the time of connection.

“The operating system automatically processes the content before the antivirus has time to scan,” the expert emphasized.

The most dangerous scenario for the device is BadUSB (there is a microcontroller inside the flash drive that pretends to be a keyboard), Shcherbakov noted.

“The system sees not a flash drive, but a keyboard and trusts it. The microcontroller enters commands at a speed of thousands of characters per second: opens the command line, downloads the virus and installs it. You only see flashing windows,” the expert explained.

He also explained how to protect your device from viruses.