How will a bad flash drive or external hard drive that’s plugged into a PC just lock up the entire system, or slow it down so much that it basically becomes unresponsive and needs rebooting?
In: Technology
There are two species of “bad flash drives”.
1) When a flash drive is plugged in, code on the drive is run as part of the operating system. Thsi code can literally do anything, install malware, encrypt your hard drive for ransom, anything.
2) When the flash drive is plugged in, it gets power from the computer, this is how you charge your phone via USB. If it puts that power into compact supercapacitors, it can charge them up in about 30 seconds. Then, using the data wires that run to your CPU, the capacitors can be discharged as a couple hundred hundred volts of spike current, literally electrocuting your CPU and rendering your hardware worthless.
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