PSA: My coworker almost gave me a ransomware scare with a USB stick

So last Tuesday I was at my desk in the Tacoma office, just finishing up some tenant paperwork, when my coworker Dave walks over and drops a USB stick on my keyboard. He says 'Hey, found this in the parking lot, maybe it's got some funny videos.' I almost plugged it in because I'm nosy, but then I remembered that old cybersecurity training video from 2019. I grabbed a spare laptop we keep for maintenance inspections and plugged it in there instead. That thing was loaded with malicious scripts, like 4 different .exe files with weird names. I ran a scan and it flagged everything as trojans. I told Dave he owes me lunch for a week because I probably saved his computer. Has anyone else had a close call with random USB drops in their work parking lot?

2 comments

2 Comments

faithj1019d ago

Wow, my buddy did the same thing with a random flash drive and his work PC totally crashed.

jamieburns19d ago

Yeah, same thing happened to my cousin. He found this flash drive in a parking lot and plugged it into his laptop at work to see if it had any music on it. The whole system just froze up and then the IT guys had to take his laptop away for like a week. They told him it could have been malware or a virus designed to get into company networks. They were super strict about him not using random drives anymore.