Superficially harmless, pen drives have already caused great damage, especially by carrying malware that affect large installations, such as nuclear and power plants and can affect computers connected to a certain network.
But a recent case in Ecuador showed another kind of danger, physical, when one of these USB accessories exploded when a journalist from the country connected it to a PC.
The pen drive had been mailed without proper identification to five professionals. All were designed to explode, but only one did, the one sent to Lenin Artieda, from Ecuavisa television. According to the AFP agency, the journalist suffered minor injuries to his hands and face, and no one else was injured.
The flash drive had an explosive charge of 5 volts, and the police believe that the RDX explosive was usedwhich can be used alone as a base charge for detonators or mixed with other explosives such as TNT.
Not all explosive shells were activated, perhaps due to little energy being transmitted to the flash drive, which made the explosion smaller than expected. The other journalists who connected the flash drives, for different reasons, ended up not activating the explosives.
Ecuador’s Interior Minister Juan Zapata confirmed that all five cases used the same type of USB device and said the incidents send a clear message to silence journalists.
In a statement quoted by the BBC, the Ecuadorian government said: “Any attempt to intimidate journalism and freedom of expression is a repugnant action that must be punished with all the rigor of justice.”
There is still no conclusion on the motivation of the attack, but some of the pen drives sent brought either threats, or posed as sources that would provide exclusive information to unmask the Correismo movement, an Ecuadorian political movement named after former President Rafael Correa, who was president of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017.
