IT Support was needed by the teams of IT engineers from the IT companies that received a free promotional USB thumb drive from IBM at this month's AusCERT information IT security conference in Australia. The problem was that the free IT product had something free as well installed on it and that was malware. Because of this, the company sent an apologetic e-mail to anyone that got the USB thumb drive to warn them about the unintended issue. IBM's chief technologist in Australia, Glenn Wightwick, wrote that "At the AusCERT conference this week, you may have collected a complimentary USB key from the IBM booth. Unfortunately we have discovered that some of these USB keys contained malware and we suspect that all USB keys may be affected." Phil Battison, director at memory stick vendor USB2U, said that "Auto-run files seem like a good idea because they force the user to view your pre-loaded information but you do, as IBM have discovered, run a very small risk with auto-run files of introducing malware."
