Author: Ryan Grenoble / Source: HuffPost
On Sunday, March 30, U.S. Secret Service agents apprehended a 28-year-old Chinese woman by the name of Yujing Zhang attempting to sneak onto President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
On Zhang’s person at the time were four cell phones, a laptop, an external hard drive and one thumb drive, the contents of which were virulent enough to nearly corrupt the computer of the trained data forensics analyst asked to examine it.
Secret Service Agent Samuel Ivanovich, who arrested Zhang, testified in a hearing Monday that the drive immediately began installing malware on the analyst’s machine after he began an examination.
“He had to immediately stop the analysis and shut off his computer to halt the corruption,” Mr. Ivanovich said, calling the incident “very out of the ordinary.”
As for how extraordinary that might have been, a spokesperson for the Secret Service was unable to comment on the specifics of this case ― so we can’t definitively say what happened ― but he assured HuffPost basic security protocols were followed.
Contrary to speculation on the internet surrounding the incident, the Secret Service said a data forensics agent would never just pick up a thumb drive and plug it into a laptop.
Instead of plugging the USB drive directly into a computer, protocol calls for creating an image of…
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