Social Engineering, the USB Way

The article "Social Engineering, the USB Way" amused and scared me a lot: When a credit union’s employees happened to find USB keys (with Trojans software), they were so happy to pick up and plug into company computers --- Everybody likes free stuff! :) The Trojans software ran secretly on those computers and sent emails to hackers with users’ important data --- It is so easy to hack a system!

From that story and discussions, I realized two important security problems people ignore:

1) Most people use Administrator account for daily work.

For a financial company with customer SSN, birth date, and address in database, it is quite important to train employees to use non-admin account to avoid virus and Trojans software to some degree. However, in reality, many people (even IT people!) in financial company still do not feel that danger. They love the convenience of Administrator account!

2) Auto-Run feature may run malicious software automatically

Auto-Run feature is useful to play music CDs (not from Sony!), but if hackers use that feature to install virus or Trojans software, it will become a nightmare to users.

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