Are you the type of person who would plug a USB stick you find on the street into your computer just out of curiosity? Do you usually charge your smartphone battery using every USB port you find? Be careful!
USB port: the risks that a simple connector can hide
Among all the technological standards that permeate our lives
USB is, without a doubt, the most common. You may not realize it, but stop for a moment and think about how many places and on how many background removal devices we have a port of this type: computers, notebooks, smartphones, smartwatches (and other gadgets from the Internet of Things market)… Even our sound systems, televisions and cars couldn’t stay out of this and gained USB ports!
Its popularity is no surprise. An abbreviation for universal serial bus (or universal serial port, in Portuguese), the USB standard is so successful precisely because of the main characteristic sought in its design: universality , serving to simultaneously transmit data and electrical energy between two electronic devices of practically any type. Just to give you an idea, if we were to list the ports that USB replaced with its flexibility, we could mention the serial port, the parallel port, the game port, the Firewire, the PS/2…
However, believe it or not, this massive popularization
of the USB standard can also present cyber risks. The most famous threat we can mention here is the classic malicious USB drive: an innocent на успешна рекламаТаговемодерен декор person finds the device lying around and, out of curiosity, ends up connecting it to their own computer to discover its contents. Unfortunately, the storage device will be infected with malware that will put the security of that Internet user’s data at risk.
What about charging totems?
It has become common to find totems with USB ports so that citizens can charge their cell phones, especially in shopping malls and airports. The practice has also become common in ride-sharing vehicles. Even USB sockets, ready to be built into the wall of any home america email list or commercial establishment, can now be found on the market.
