Mastering Reverse Engineering

Media storage

Network administrators are very restrictive when it comes to using thumb drives. The primary reason is that external storage devices, such as USB thumb drives, CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, and even smartphones are all media in which malware can store itself. Once a storage device gets mounted to a computer, it serves like a regular drive. Malware can simply drop copies of itself to these storage drives. Similar to network worms, these are worms that depend on the user to run the malware. But with the Windows Autorun feature turned on, malware may execute once the drive is mounted, as can be seen in the following screenshot:

The previous image is the default dialog encountered when inserting a CD drive containing setup software. ...