By now we’ve all heard of the Agent.btz worm that infected miltary networks last year and caused a virtual ban on removable storage inside the US Department of Defense. That worm was introduced into the secure DoD network on an insecure USB flash drive. Once the infected thumb drive was inserted into a computer on the internal DoD network, the malware auto-ran and infected the computer itself, which then infected other computers that were attached to network storage.

Recently the Conficker worm has been spreading to millions of computers. It too can spread via autorun technology.

Now we are seeing ever more variants of malware adopting the autorun strategy to spread via removable media. Sophos has reported that the Virtumonde or Vundo virus now has autorun technology.

It’s becoming pretty clear that dumb removable storage devices are a very real and growing threat. We need to be using intelligent self-defending storage devices, like the IronKey Enterprise Flash Drive. Our device has a whole suite of active anti-malware protections which stop autorun malware from infecting the device or infecting other computers and networks.

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