The expert spoke about the spread of malware flash drives by fraudsters in Russia

Fraudsters intentionally leave infected flash drives and other devices with malicious code near office buildings, inside elevators, and in parking lots of business centers across Russia in order to infiltrate employees' workstations and gain unauthorized access to corporate infrastructure. This was announced on May 6 by Ilona Kokova, a leading information security expert at MWS Cloud.

"Flash drives are deliberately scattered. <...> In cybersecurity experiments, more than half of people connect the found flash drives to their devices. And this is enough to get into the infrastructure without hacking and complex techniques," she shared with RIA Novosti.

Kokova emphasized that a flash drive usually hides a file that looks like a document or image. When a user tries to open it, malicious software is automatically activated on the computer. This hidden code is triggered due to the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the operating system, for example, due to outdated device protection mechanisms.

It is specified that the flash drive may not be a drive, but a malicious device. It is capable of automatically executing commands, downloading viruses, changing system settings, or disabling computers with high voltage.

Workaround: the darknet has started selling a turnkey phishing constructor

Experts warn of a possible surge in fraud activity

Andrey Rybnikov, a lecturer at the Department of Instrumental and Applied Software at RTU MIREA, told RT on May 2 that fraudsters in their schemes began to fake the voices of an interlocutor familiar to a person using neural networks. Rybnikov added that it can be difficult to recognize such a fake, especially if the message is transmitted by voice message without a visual row.