Apart from the invididual victims, ransomware seems like it should have a good effect on computer security overall since it actually harms the people who get infected and motivates them to do security better. Most viruses keep quiet so people don't know or care if they're infected and contributing to DDOSs or spreading to others. I sometimes use computers that have obvious viruses on them, and it the people running them just let it happen because it doesn't stop their work.
Yes. I can't wait until self-driving car ransomware appears.
The amount of rage the customers will feel towards the makers of whatever non-secure self-driving or "connected" cars receive the ransomware should give those car makers a nice kick in the behind to get their act together.
Then we'll see how quick the car makers will be about implementing features such as "unlocking your car remotely from the beach."
I wouldn't say I "can't wait" for car viruses, but I do worry about all the stupid remote/automated features being advertised these days. You just know it's going to be exploited, and cars are at the top of my list of things that should be as safe and secure as possible.
That mostly boils down to lowering the attack surface.
Individual cars doing their own thing, no problem. Cars talking to cloud, big privacy problem, potential security problem. Cars talking to each other locally, smaller privacy problem, but bigger security problem.
It seems like very few viruses are "obvious" these days - aside from ransomware. How do you know what you're doing on these computers isn't affected or compromised in that case?
Usually just printing. I find the viruses on my USB drive after printing from it on other people's computers. I keep that drive for one-way use and never get files back off it because they're all potentially infected.
Note that that the pendrive itself is potentially "infected" too, sometimes there are OS and file manager bugs resulting in code execution without the user clicking anything.
I don't do step 3. Viruses hardly ever work that way. An infected computer can infect a USB drive, but not the other way around for an up-to-date OS and if you're careful not to run mystery programs you find on it.
USB sticks that can use firmware-level filesystem tables and/or multiple host-visible partitions, pretend to be a hub that is hosting multiple devices (HID mouse+keyboard, etc) in addition to an autorun, etc.
Not only can you trivially make such a thing with an arduino but there are also some commercial USB sticks which have a persistent "background" filesystem that cannot be formatted away.
Anything that is run automatically in the background, like the thumbnail services.
However, this is rather theoretical. All that common malware does is hide/delete all your existing directories, and put EXEs (or LNKs) with folder icons and the names of the original directories in their place. Plus maybe some autorun tricks.
For a fake HID device, you'd see cmd windows or whatever else it uses popping up. Other data hidden on it isn't a problem by itself. It can only passively sit there without some other attack vector.
Except that is not true, there's BadUSB (https://github.com/brandonlw/Psychson), which updates the firmware of some common USB drives to make it do whatever your want (such as emulating a mouse/keyboard).
