Business Solutions & Software Group Blog

How often do you find random USB flash drives while you’re cleaning up your office? Even with cloud storage as common as it is, there are still times and places for USB drives, so it’s not uncommon to find them out and about. The problem, however, is that you don’t know what’s on them until you plug them in… and depending on the contents, you might be in for a world of trouble.

We often take for granted that people know what we are talking about when we talk about popular connectors, but really how do these systems work? For this week’s tech term, we are going to take a look at something we all have used and probably are actively using: the Universal Serial Bus (USB). We will take a look at the origins of this technology, the development of it, and how it is being used today.

This past August, we reported on a new vulnerability with USB firmware called BadUSB. This vulnerability was discovered by Karsten Nohl of SR Labs. The BadUSB vulnerability was presented at the Black Hat security conference as a theoretical risk, but now, the code has leaked and this risk has become a reality. Oops.