Taiwanese police give away infected usb sticks at cybersecurity event

Curious news that comes to us from Taiwan. Taiwan's national police agency has been forced to apologize. The reason? Delivering a total of 54 USB sticks infected with malware at a cybersecurity event. All of them had been infected with malware that is capable of stealing personal data from computers. So far , 20 memories have been recovered.

Police give away infected USB sticks at cybersecurity event

A total of 250 units were given away at the event that sought to showcase the efforts of the Taiwanese government to fight crime online. The most curious and ironic part is that a fifth of the attendees took a poisoned gift.

Infected by a check

All USB flash drives have been made in China. Although the possibility that it was a measure of espionage by China has already been ruled out. Apparently the bug comes from a Taiwanese vendor as they got infected by a simple check. An employee of the company was responsible for transferring data to the 54 affected reports. The idea was to check its storage capacity.

It was in this process that they ended up infected. The specific malware is XtbSeDuA.exe. It has been designed to steal personal data and then transmits it to an IP address in Poland, which then bounces off an unknown server.

According to the country's police, only older computers are vulnerable to this malware. Furthermore, the vast majority of antivirus available on the market are capable of detecting it. The USB sticks were delivered between December 11 and 12. At the moment there are still 34 memories that have not been recovered by the police.

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