this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It seems like they could be rendered ineffective by simply disabling auto run and forcing removable drives to mount noexec.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 month ago (2 children)

This should be the default on all PCs.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] specialseaweed 8 points 1 month ago

You would be shocked at the amount of times employees would bring devices into our air gapped network.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Yeah our corporate machines won't run any external media. I assumed that was standard practice.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Well it’s believed it entices users to click the malware to run by disguising itself as the last accessed folder with the same name and folder icon.

In that case having the option to always show extensions enabled would be helpful for trained users who care to be careful.

It’s not that interesting sounding given we know the NSA and eyes countries have developed compromised firmware for certain hard drives to enable true spread without interaction or hope of prevention. Whenever I see one of these I wonder if it’ll be a case of compromising the device itself but it’s this old stuff instead which can be defeated with a good security posture.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hidden file extensions is such a terrible default it amazes me that Microsoft is still doing that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

macOS does this too shockingly despite using the file extension as a “hint” to the file type. I think it’s unique in that most UNIX/Linux systems use magic number and Windows blindly accepts that the file is of the type that matches the extension.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

When the drive is mounted noexec it's not possible to run any programs on it. You can also mount any user writable directories noexec so they can't copy the program somewhere else and run it.