by Ken Colburn, East Valley Tribune
Now that USB (or flash) drives are in wide use, virus writers have spent time figuring out ways to combine the old ‘infection by physical connection’ method with Internet worms to find ways into networks that have strong firewall technology in place, but weak desktop security. The ‘back door’ to a secured network on most large corporate or educational computer networks has become the USB port on any of the attached computers. The first thing that you should consider doing if the transfer is generally from your home computer to the school’s computers is to flip the ‘write protect’ switch on the drive before plugging it into any computer at school. This turns your USB drive into a ‘read only’ device like a traditional CD or DVD preventing anything from the school computers to be written to the drive. When you return home, simply flip the switch back to allow writing to the drive from your computer.
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