USB Worms Top The List of Malware in Q1 2010
According to McAfee’s Q1 Threat Report, malware that is designed to spread onto USB removable storage devices was the most prevalent malware threat in Q1 2010. The number 1 most detected malware variant by McAfee researchers was “Generic! Atr”, followed by a number of password-stealing Trojans and the Autorun Conficker worm.
This should come as no surprise. The ability to infect USB drives, and then spread onto computers on which those drives are used, has become a widely exploited technique in many malware packages. Perhaps the most famous case of such an infection was in late 2008 when such a worm, “Agent.btz”, infected sensitive Department of Defense computers. This led to a lockdown by the DoD of all removable storage devices until they could define a set of technical operating requirements to ensure that malware cannot spread onto and from removable storage devices.
IronKey worked with the Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and other bureaus to help define these technical requirements. Now these capabilities are available to Enterprise customers of IronKey devices. They include services such as built-in anti-malware scanning, intelligent hardware-based autorun tamper prevention, read-only mode, etc.