US Air Force pilots used malware-laden USB drives to plan Afghanistan missions
Former Air Force staff say pilots used locally bought USB drives that later carried Agent.BTZ into military systems.
A Register column recounts former Air Force security staffer Justin Henkel’s account of early-2000s mission planning that moved data between unclassified and classified systems on the same CDs and later USB drives. Personnel often bought flash drives in local Afghan markets, and adversaries later supplied infected devices to those vendors. In 2008, the Agent.BTZ worm infected US Defense Department systems after an infected USB was attached to a laptop with access to US Central Command; it collected information and contacted remote servers. A 2016 FBI and DHS report attributed the malware to one or more Russian groups, and the Pentagon spent about 14 months removing it before banning, then later limiting, USB use.