Beware! That harmless USB pen drive could burn down your computer

Mumbai: USB pen drives are just a simple, harmless device that you plug into your system’s USB port and transfer data to and from it. While most pen drives are similar in size, the only difference could be the aesthetics and the storage capacities.

Earlier, and also nowadays, USB pen drives are easily available. Pen drives are sold in the open, and on the streets are usually available for a very cheap price. You may even find 32GB pen drives sold for as little as Rs 500. Tempting as they are priced, you should know that they could be fakes. These pen drives are nothing but a simple dud! They are built using a single chip, which is a firmware driven integrated chip. It tricks your computer into showing up a USB storage on your computer with the capacity shown on the packaging—8GB to 32GB or even more. It shows that the capacity is valid and the storage is vacant. But the truth comes alive when you try copying some data to it and the pen drive does not do anything. Well, you have finally been fooled as the pen drive is a fake.

However, recent information shows that there are certain pen drives in the market that are burning up the laptop or desktop they are connected to. The USB pen drive houses a powerful circuit that contains voltage doublers and a few capacitors. The 5V DC power supplied to the USB pen drive from your humble USB port, drives the internal circuit to keep doubling the voltage to 110V or even higher. This voltage is stored into the capacitors, which can hold the power for a long time, until they are connected somewhere. Now just imagine what happens when you connect this pen drive to a computer—boom. The 110V or higher (stored on the capacitors) find their way to the USB port on your laptop or computer and burn down everything inline with it. This could cause a fire and can also prove fatal in certain cases. The killer USB stick was reported on a Russian website. The post also stated that the USB pen drives were also targeted to people, where the pen drive would explode inside the pocket, causing harm from burns to even death in certain cases.

Well, there are other reports which state that some Chinese USB pen drivers were built with malware inside the flash drive’s firmware. Once connected, the user is completely unaware about what it does in the background. The malware transmits data back to the servers (its destination). There is no way you can format this pen drive completely as the malware is encoded inside the firmware. You can only get rid of the malware is by tossing the entire pen drive into the fire.

So the next time you come across tempting cheap pen drives, be careful—you could end up with your private data on the internet, a hijacked computer or even worse—six-feet under.