A whole office of computers got a virus from a single USB drive

Last Tuesday, a teacher at the local high school plugged in a flash drive she found in the parking lot, and by noon, the entire lab's 30 machines were locked up with ransomware. We spent the rest of the week doing full system wipes and data recovery from the backups (which, thank goodness, were only a day old). What's the weirdest infection vector you've ever had to deal with at a site?

4 comments

4 Comments

abbyp616d ago

@marybutler says that but honestly half those guest networks are wide open to the main office traffic anyways.

cole_murphy1mo agoMost Upvoted

We had a client's network get hit because their smart fridge was on the office WiFi. The thing was trying to mine Bitcoin. My rule now is anything that isn't a computer or a phone goes on a separate guest network. Printers, thermostats, even the coffee maker get isolated. It sounds paranoid until you see a fridge eating up bandwidth and sending weird traffic.

marybutler1mo ago

Yeah, that guest network rule is key. We set up VLANs for all IoT stuff after a smart lock got weird, similar to what @robinp89 described. The real trick is making sure the guest network has no access to your main work devices, otherwise it's pointless.

robinp891mo ago

Honestly, that's a classic case. The weirdest one I saw was a brand new, still-in-the-box digital picture frame from a conference. It was a gift for the office manager. The second she plugged it in to set it up, it started trying to send spam emails from the company server. The malware was baked into the firmware at the factory. Makes you scared to plug in anything new.