[Tfug] Thumb drive sizes

[Kramer Lee]

Isn't SneakerNet is how Stuxnet was "carried".

If there is a worm on the originating machine, it might put itself on
the thumb drive, and when it is in the secondary machine it might
infect that one.  Or maybe it is fine in the originating machine but
during the plug in time in the second machine it picks up a virus on
the "to" machine, then it infects the original machine when plugged
back into that one.

There was a saying in the days of floppy disks "Practice safe
computing, always wear a write protect tab.  The last flash drive I
had with a little write protect switch is a 4 GB.  At least if the
data only went one way you could have your known uninfected machine
write to it and then flip the switch and transfer files to the
destination machine, and if there isn't a way to write to the flash
drive with its switch set to protected, you are safe.

The floppy could have a write protect tab, but that still depends on
the floppy protection circuitry working as it should, and you could
modify a floppy to write on a write protected floppy disk.  There are
ways to get around just about any protection scheme, especially if
those doing it are well financed.

I don't know if the flash drive manufacturers put in a back door so
they can write to a flash drive with its switch set to write protect.
They could.  I haven't seen a switch on a flash drive lately.  I
haven't seen a jumper for write protection on a flash BIOS much lately
either, and that is easy to write over the net.

Did your computer ever spontaneously reboot while other ones stayed on
just fine?  One of mine actually got reflashed and the only reason I
know about it is that it was the only one of 3 computers that were on
that rebooted, and it was a poor job so there was no network
communications after it happened.  It ran fine again after I reflashed
the BIOS.  I think I had visited a BIOS site just before this, I was
fooled by the site name and thought it was a real ECS motherboard
site.  It was a drive by BIOS reflash.  If it worked I wouldn't know,
but after that I reflash BIOSes somewhat regularly and reinstall.