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There's a lot of hysteria surrounding these freebie swag items, enough that you have to wonder if either exactly this sort of reaction was expected, and their laughing at exactly the expected level of fear and paranoia produced at the mere sight of a USB jack... or... they could only but roll their eyes, as they dropped a USB device into the mix out of curiosity to see if there would be any reaction at all, expecting possibly a muted, cool brush off, unconcerned about exploits, and instead caught ten or one hundred times the wave of hysteria, for something they might have internally estimated would be rated as being perceived as a mild security hazard. Seriously, this has all the alarmist fear mongering of the Cuban embassy sonic weapon mystery, but none of the smoking gun who-dunnit clues. People are going to be chasing their tails on this one, wondering if the fan rotors spin at resonating speeds to give off infra-sonic beam-forming geolocation signals, and that's after they sample scrapings from 1000 different components in a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer only to find that they were some standard chinese USB components, purchased in bulk orders months ago, but had arrived too late for Olympics swag and were basically left-overs. It's funny, but I think the volume of this knee-jerk reaction caused more damage than an actual attack could have. If North Korea was going to try and swindle it's way onto targeted USB interfaces, I'd have to imagine that they'd attempt a level of indirection (at least one), and launder the swag through a secondary shell entity, like some shady third-world press corps gadfly to the event. If they hadn't thought of that before (even though I'm sure they already do think that way), this hair-on-fire reaction has certainly taught them to do so, unconditionally, going forward. |