Windows worms including Conficker and Stuxnet have often spread onto networks after infected USB sticks were plugged into PCs. This has happened automatically in cases where autorun was enabled, as it did in default on older versions of Windows until a change pushed by Microsoft on Tuesday. With autorun-enabled executable files run with minimal user interaction.
Research by Jon Larimer, of IBM's X-Force security division, shows that the issue of autorun causing possible mischief is not (as might have been previously thought) wholly irrelevant to Linux boxes. Larimer developed a demo to show how it might be possible to insert a USB stick with modified code into a Ubuntu PC to get rid of a screensaver without entering a password
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