Hacker News

points by gosub100 1 day ago | 0 comments

I have heard of exploits that can root a machine from inserting a USB device (in fact, this has been used by attackers to conspicuously leave thumb drives in the parking lots of organizations they want to attack).

I have never heard of a sploit that roots your machine from inserting a floppy.

[–] ekaryotic 22 hours ago

floppy boot sector viruses were common back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_(computer_virus) I had one infect my home pc called ripper

[–] gosub100 17 hours ago

true, there were viruses, and they came over floppy. but USB has a hidden firmware layer. I remember one on Apple a few years ago they said is completely un-patchable because it affected the firmware on the USB chip itself. I dont remember what happened after that, though.