Currently, there are more than 2,000 glued USB sticks, sealed with cement, plaster or quick-drying paste on walls around the world. From Australia to Germany, from Russia to India, to the United States and even to Antarctica -two of them-. The reason? different.
These are called ‘dead drop’ mailboxes, a modernized version of the real blind mailboxes where correspondence was once left for someone to pick up hours later. A booming service during the Cold War that now has another function: to be an “anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer file-sharing data network in the public space”. The problem is that they are not a secure medium.
One of the first users to echo this fact, which has gone viral, is the youtuber Mr Yeester. He plugged his laptop into one of these USB drives and discovered a single image file. He swiped and opened the picture from his desk and the picture was a brick wallvery similar to the same where the USB memory coming out of its connection was integrated.
It was soon discovered that it was all part of the Dead Drops project, a system that currently has 2,263 registered USB drives with a total capacity of 70,425 GB. Less than 100 GB of virtual storage to share files between users. An isolated system, decentralized and disconnected from the network so that everyone can join what they want, a novel, a photo, a song.
And that’s the handicap: anyone. In other words, if someone decides to infect this memory, they will be able to spread malware and damage all computers that share this infected file. The author of the idea says that “it was a multimedia artist from Berlin” who started the project during his stay in New York as artist-in-residence at EYEBEAM in 2010. But beyond the artistic vocation, this system has real utility and value. But it’s not safe: they can hide secrets that corrupt your MacBook or iPhone without you realizing it.
In Applesphere | Microsoft discovers a deadly new malware for macOS: it installs without the user noticing
In Applesphere | How to know if I have a virus on the iPhone and what can I do
