LANSING – Most adults know that washing your hands reduces the risk of spreading germs, and cleaning and bandaging a wound prevents infection. But do you know what can happen when you pick up electronic germs?
In 2015, two separate groups of researchers ran experiments to test people’s curiosity and their knowledge of cyber security. One group randomly placed 297 flash drives around the campus of the University of Illinois. Another group from CompTIA, an IT association, placed 200 flash drives around four cities. The flash drives contained harmless files such as fake resumes, photos and contact information for the researchers. They contained no dangerous viruses and/or various kinds of malware; but for all anyone knew, they might have.
The locations of the flash drives were electronically tracked, as was the activity on the flash drives. The University experiment concluded that 290 of the 297 (98 percent) flash drives were picked up and moved from their starting location, and 135 of them (45 percent) were plugged into a computer and at least one file was opened. The researchers counted those as “successful” “cyber attacks.” In the CompTIA experiment, 20 percent were classified as such.
To read the rest of the article, click on https://www.sbam.org/Resources/ArtMID/2980/ArticleID/2345/Cyber-security-Curiosity-can-kill-more-than-the-cat
