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RE: New Flash Drive Threat, No Cure?

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Re: RE: New Flash Drive Threat, No Cure?
« Reply #3 on: August 09, 2014, 05:12:48 PM »
 

rokytnji

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I dunno

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/07/2037223/two-thirds-of-lost-usb-drives-carry-malware

Story has been around since 2011. It has not effected me yet.

Not much on Tech Dirt site either.

Quote
Someone named Nicholas Krause is all over the Linux kernel mailing lists. Theodore Ts’o of ext4 fame today posted a “A public service announcement regarding wanna-be kernel developer Nick Krause.”

Nick seems to have ‘started’ his kernel journey by posting a message about ‘finding’ a kernel developer jot at the kernel hub. Later he graduated to become a ‘patcher’ akin to ‘Transporter’ of Jason Statham and started sending patches to different kernel mailing lists.

Theodore says, “So far, he has tried to do this with the ext4, btrfs, scsi, and usb subsystems. I’m probably missing a few.”

What is Nick, the patcher, trying to achieve? Theodore suspects, “…he’s jumping around to different subsystems hoping to find one where his reputation hasn’t been blackened yet by his refusal to deeply understand kernel code (or to test to see if it compiles, never mind trying to boot a kernel with that patch and exercise the modified code) before starting to try to “help”.”

There are many theories around why the patcher might be doing it. Some say that he is writing a University Thesis on trolling the kernel development process (either by seeing if an obviously broken patch could be snuck past the peer review system, or to see if he can try to get someone to lose their temper much like Linus is supposed to do all the time — not realizing that this only happens to people who really should know better, not to clueless newbies), are that he’s a badly written AI chatbot, or just a clueless high school student with more tenacity than one usually expects at that age,” says Theodore.

There are many other theories such as it could be some joruno or redditter trying to get burned by Linus to get some headlines. It could be NSA trying to sneak their code, it could be Russians. But none of these theories beat the one by Giorgio A. Tsoukalos who believes that it’s aliens trolling the Linux Kernel mailing list.

Whatever be the motive of the patcher the maintainer have wasted their time in ensuring none of his bogus code is merged.

Might scare me more.

But they have him under control also.
« Last Edit: August 09, 2014, 05:23:12 PM by rokytnji »
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Re: RE: New Flash Drive Threat, No Cure?
« Reply #2 on: August 08, 2014, 08:56:23 PM »
 

gold_finger

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Do Linux users need to be concerned?

I would imagine this is bad no matter what OS is being used.

Here is more info about it:  http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229256
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RE: New Flash Drive Threat, No Cure?
« Reply #1 on: August 08, 2014, 11:25:19 AM »
 

mannshands

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Hi,
I see Ask Bob Rankin has sent out an alert. There is a new USB threat involving Flash drives having infected firmware that can not be scanned for! They are suggesting you toss any Flash drives that have ever been plugged into a public computer! What is this gonna do to the Live Distro on a stick and portable programs market?
http://askbobrankin.com/alert_serious_security_flaw_in_usb_drives.html?awt_l=OLYwA&awt_m=Ijhg0UHn7uP6SL

Do Linux users need to be concerned?

Thanks
mannshands
 

 

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