Pro tip: that cheap USB drive you got at a conference might be a security risk

Picked up one of those free 16GB drives at a tech expo in Portland last month and plugged it in at home... next morning my bank flagged a login from a different state. Turns out those giveaways can have malware preloaded. I ran a scan and found something that tried to grab my saved passwords. Has anyone else had issues with swag drives doing shady stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

paulschmidt21d agoMost Upvoted

and that's exactly why I tell people to never plug random USB drives into anything important. You can get cheap drives that work fine for file transfer but the preloaded malware is a whole different beast lol. I had a buddy who got one at a conference and it fried his work laptop's boot sector, took IT three days to get him back up. Best practice is to use those free drives for nothing more than a blank slate for reformatting, or just toss them altogether. The risk isn't worth the "free" storage space when you can grab a known brand for like 8 bucks.

the_charles21d ago

Tossed one of those free conference drives in my laptop once thinking nothing of it, and @paulschmidt is exactly right about the malware risk. Spent the next hour explaining to IT how a "freebie" managed to corrupt my USB controller drivers. Stuck with known brands now, even if it costs a few bucks to save the headache.