Gizmo Ground

In what is sure to help give even more ulcers to company IT security admin's around the world, comes news of a new exploit that can compromise a computer (and by extension any network connected to that computer). The idea of rooting & hacking a computer via software or hardware exploits is about as old as computers themselves. This new exploit though, is certainly an interesting tweak on things as it has the potential to be not only devastating, but completely silent and unnoticed.
Two bright researchers at George Mason University have discovered a way to surreptitiously modify Andrioid's USB drivers so that it does some pretty nasty things. In a nutshell what this modified driver can do is allow a nasty piece of malware on the phone to slurp up all important data on the computer as soon as it the phone's USB cable is plugged into the computer and then spit that data to whomever the author wants! Even worse is the fact that this exploit could easily be customized to work on other phones running different operating systems such as the iPhone; so it is not as simple as simply boycotting Android based phones.
Worse still, is you could easily not realize that your phone has been compromised - nor your computer - as it is very unlikely typical anti-virus software would consider this an unwanted activity and just consider it a legitimate data transfer request. Luckily, this exploit is not in the wild yet and still only been done in the lab. Of course now that malware authors know it is possible, it probably won't be too long before it becomes a reality. As with anything computer related, being careful in what you download and what you run on your phone is your best defence against nasty pieces of work like this.