(Photo: Victoria Police)
If you found a piece of pizza in the street, would you eat it? If you found a random USB drive in your mailbox, would you plug it into your computer?
Your answer to these questions, at any rate, should be"no", but, for some fraction of humanity, the answer, on occasion, is, "yes." Maybe it depends on the day. Say it's a random Thursday in late September, and life is feeling pretty short. And you're feeling a little dangerous. That random USB drive that showed up in your mailbox? Why not give it a whirl. What's the worst that could happen? Or, better: what's the best?
Lately, a lot of Australians have been encountering this exact dilemma, after some random USB drives have been showing up in mailboxes in the Australian state of Victoria.
Police say that the drives are "believed to be extremely harmful," though you wouldn't really know it until you tried it out yourself, wouldn't you?
"Upon inserting the USB drives into their computers victims have experienced fraudulent media streaming service offers, as well as other serious issues," police said Wednesday.
This seems like a small price to pay for a brief moment of thrill, though you can be your own judge on the matter.
So far, the drives have just been seen in Pakenham, a suburb of Melbourne, in what is either a silly prank or a low-tech hacking attempt. But the fun could be coming soon to a city near you.