Hackers always are on the lookout for the most vulnerable spot on your personal computers. These days, that weakest link might be your flash thumb drive.
Thumb drives — which can fit gigabytes of documents, music and video on a stick about the size of a pack of gum — are a convenient way to shuffle files among different computers. They plug into your computer’s universal serial bus port and appear as a hard drive on your PC.
Their growing popularity, huge storage capacity and ability to load a computer’s essential system files makes them an inviting target for hackers, too.
ThreatSense.Net, the malware monitoring site run by antivirus software maker Eset, found that 10.3% of recent malware detections involved programs trying to take advantage of thumb drives and other removable media.