“You still need to be cautious of USB drive viruses”, says Kaspersky

by Bailey Martin SEO Expert

Kaspersky Lab has recently released a statement that USB devices are still a potent threat. Cybercrooks are finding it an easy medium to attack the devices for crypto-mining. The number of such attacks is not so high; but one cannot ignore the fact that these numbers are continuously increasing.

USB Drive

The cybersecurity firm analyzed the current scenario of USB drive threats and said that regardless of the several alerts issued by the most trusted company, Google, most of the businesses are commonly using these drives for the storage and transfer of their confidential data. Considering the previous data recorded by the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN), the top 10 list of attacks that were done by using removal media has been led for the past three years.

Such threats resulted the aging 2010 ‘Stuxnet vulnerability’ exploit and rapidly growing crypto-miners. According to this data, Trojan.Win32.Miner.ays/ Trojan.Win64.Miner.all is the biggest crypto-miner that was detected in the USB drive-roots.

First detected in 2014, the Trojan injects the mining application onto the targeted device and then installs and quietly launches the mining software. The threat simply downloads the requirement that asks the computer user to send any information to an external server which is in the control of an attacker.

Detection of such crypto-miners is increasing and it is expected to be grown by 16.42% during this fiscal year. This increase in the number clearly indicates how easy it is for the hackers to use removable media for such type of threats. Businesses especially the emerging ones where USB devices are being used commonly have higher chances of getting infected with this removable media threat.

When counting the most affected markets, Asia, Africa, and South America are at the top of the list. However, Europe and North America have also got isolated hits by the crypto-mining. According to the Kaspersky Security Network report, 8% of threats aiming industrial control systems were spread through USB drives only.

Source:http://activationkaspersky.com/cautious-of-usb-drive-viruses/