Attack of the flash drive

This is pretty interesting. An enemy attack could be bound up in something as simple as a USB flash drive inserted in a laptop on the other side of the world:

The most serious cyber attack on the US military's networks came from a tainted flash drive in 2008, forcing the Pentagon to review its digital security, a top US defense official said Wednesday.

The thumb drive, which was inserted in a military laptop in the Mideast, contained malicious code that "spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control," Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs.

The code was placed on the drive by "a foreign intelligence agency," Lynn wrote.

"It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary."

Previous media reports speculated that the attack may have originated from Russia.