Stealthy USB Trojan hides in portable applications, targets air-gapped systems

A Trojan program is being distributed through USB drives and seems to be designed for stealing information from so-called air-gapped computers that are not connected to the Internet.

The new Trojan has been dubbed USB Thief by security researchers from antivirus firm ESET and has several characteristics that set it apart from the traditional malware programs that spread using USB storage devices and the Windows Autorun feature.

First of all, USB Thief infects USB drives that contain portable installations of popular applications like Firefox, NotePad++ or TrueCrypt. It’s copied to such installations as a plug-in or DLL (dynamic link library) and is then executed along with those applications.

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