2026-09-21T06:03:35Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/89034 2023-07-11 col_2142_5131 col_2142_8888 com_2142_5130 com_2142_8887 com_2142_234

Bailey, Michael Tischer, Matthew A 2016-03-02T19:34:09Z 2016-03-02T19:34:09Z 2015-12-01 2015-12 In today’s computer security climate, attacks against computers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and cheaper to execute. In this thesis, we present the results of a study conducted on the University of Illinois campus to determine the effectiveness of dropping 297 “infected” USB flash drives in a public place as an attack vector. A self-report survey given to 71 individuals highlights some of the psychological processes that motivate people to plug in the flash drives. We find that this type of attack is generally effective and relatively insensitive to its precise environmental configuration. Generally, participants expressed desire to return the flash drives to their owners, although our data shows that they also explored the contents of the flash drives on occasion. Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2016-03-02 without embargo terms The student, Matthew Tischer, accepted the attached license on 2015-12-01 at 14:34. The student, Matthew Tischer, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2015-12-01 at 14:44. This Thesis was approved for publication on 2015-12-01 at 15:21. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #8896 on 2016-03-02 at 12:50:51 Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-02T19:34:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 TISCHER-THESIS-2015.pdf: 1714656 bytes, checksum: f5109b0f7abc49e056d4d44f10b63f5f (MD5) LICENSE.txt: 4212 bytes, checksum: 6c29b029563bb7bfc15ffc4b7a5c216e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-12-01 application/pdf http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89034 en Copyright 2015 Matthew Tischer social engineering Universal Serial Bus (USB) Testing the malicious USB anecdote text text Electrical & Computer Engineering Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Thesis M.S.