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Black Hat Day 1: Threats Big and Small

The Cipher Brief’s Luke Penn-Hall is currently attending Black Hat, a premiere information security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Here’s his update from Day 1:

What is a USB Drop Attack?  That’s what I learned about today at a brief focused on assessing how often people actually plug strange USB drives into their computer. Just to be clear, you should never do that - but this study found that 45% of the 297 drives they left lying around a university were both plugged in and accessed by the people who found them.  Discussions raised many interesting questions – but fewer answers - about cyber-hygiene and social engineering.

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