14 DAY TRIAL // Australian Police has issued an alert regarding unknown individuals leaving unmarked USB thumb drives inside random people's letterboxes.
The warning, which was published on the website of the Victoria Police, one of Australia's state police departments, warns that upon inserting these USB drives inside their computers, "victims have experienced fraudulent media streaming service offers, as well as other serious issues."
Pakenham residents targeted in recent wave of incidents
According to the police alert, these attacks have currently taken place only in the small and quiet town of Pakenham, located 56 km south-east from Melbourne and with a population that just surpassed 30,000.
While some crook has found a unique way of distributing banking trojans or who knows what malware, the problem of people blindly plugging USB drives into their computers is not a new one.
A study published in October 2015 revealed that 17 percent of users from across five US cities had no second thoughts about plugging a USB drive in their PCs, moments after they just found it on the street.
As seen in a Mr. Robot episode...
In another study from April 2016, a security researcher inspired by a Mr. Robot TV episode left 300 USBs on the streets of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.
The researcher was baffled to find out that 98 of the USB sticks had been picked up, and 48 percent of users accessed the devices, trying to click and interact with the files they found inside.
Taking into account that just last month a Hong Kong company also started selling a USB stick that short-circuits any computer it's plugged into, users are advised to show more caution when dealing with newly found USB drives.
Attached to this article is an image of two of the USB thumb drives found by Pakenham residents.