That $14 USB drive from a flea market gave me a scare in Orlando

I grabbed a cheap USB stick at a flea market outside Orlando last month, figured it was fine for moving some photos. Plugged it into my laptop at a coffee shop and it auto-ran something, my antivirus lit up instantly. Turns out it had a hidden autorun script that tried to pull a keylogger. I yanked it out, ran a full scan, and ended up wiping my whole system just to be safe. Has anyone else gotten burned by random used storage, and do you ever trust them after that?

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1 Comment

reese_bell22d ago

Hold on a second. Used drives are not some kind of booby trap waiting to go off, and half of these horror stories come down to people ignoring their own computer's warnings. Your antivirus did its job, that's what it's for, and you panicking and nuking your whole system was probably way more damage than the actual threat. The real issue here is people plugging unknown hardware into a machine with any important files on it, which is just poor common sense, not a reason to swear off a perfectly good cheap item. Those flea market drives are fine for moving around public stuff or music, as long as you treat them like any other stranger's device and never plug them into something you care about without a barrier. You got a scare, sure, but that doesn't make every used drive a landmine, it just means you learned a lesson about your own setup.