The ever-increasing popularity of USB drives is causing problems. It is not just branded USB pens that are spreading like wildfire but a virus is spreading with them. Particular hotbeds of virus infection are university campuses. With the ease of portability of USB drives and the plug-in-and-play nature students find this the easiest way to transfer their work. However, this fluid transport of computer data has caused more than 500 incidents reported in just 13 universities, this being half of the 27 universities approached for this research. One of the major contributing factors to the virus attacks has been that many university anti-virus security networks haven’t been updated after being installed resulting in them being unable to prevent this virus from infecting their computers. It is worrying that USB drives can carry viruses but it is more worrying that if university computers can be infected then personal computers must also be in danger.
What exactly do these viruses do?
The main culprit of these outbreaks is a virus called “autorun”. When a USB flash drive is infected with this virus and is inserted into a USB drive of another computer the virus reproduces itself within the new system. The only noticeable signs of infection have been reported to be minor such as the computer running slowly but the serious nature of the virus can’t be seen. The virus can email data saved on an infected computer to other users and it can also allow other viruses to attack the computer it has infected. It has even been reported that in one case the virus couldn’t be destroyed until the computer had been disassembled!
The worst thing about this autorun virus is that there is no way of telling if an infected computer’s data has been stolen. If highly confidential information from such organisations as universities are vulnerable then other organisations are liable to the threat of infection. Before we get carried away about a computer virus pandemic USB drives are most popular amongst the student population and as a result Universities are naturally the most vulnerable to virus infections via USB drives.
In the University of Tokyo before the virus was discovered computers didn’t have antivirus software installed because the administrators believed that the computers were not at risk because they were not connected to the Internet.
The Solution
The solution is not preventing the use of branded USB flash drives. This will not and should not happen. As students and others become aware of the risk of using USB devices virus infections will decrease whilst computer administrators will take more care in protecting their networks. Using USB drives is a fantastically easy and efficient way to transport computer data and with the price of USB drives continuing to fall they are here to stay and consequently we will only be seeing an increase in popularity of flash drives in the future.