Sneakergate

The U.S. government gets jittery about malware.

Here's a great start for a newspaper story: the LA Times reported that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were recently briefed on a pressing security threat. The U.S. Strategic Command in turn raised its network operations security level.

Too bad the threat probably wasn't really aimed at the government.

The threat was a tiny piece of software, called "malware," embedded in removable media devices, namely USB sticks. And although the Bush administration might feel under attack from many sides, this attack probably wasn't a carefully planned campaign.

"I think it's just coincidental," says Paul Ferguson, a researcher at Trend Micro, the world's third-largest Internet security company behind McAfee (nyse: MFE - news - people ) and Symantec (nasdaq: SYMC - news - people ).

Instead of being a targeted cyberwarfare attack, this malware is simply a run-of-the-mill trojan virus that travels by "sneakernet," the tongue-in-cheek name for the transmission of viruses across unconnected computers by hand (or foot) in the days before widespread Internet connectivity. "Most of this malware is just seeded by criminals that cast a very wide net," Ferguson says.

The malicious software "agent.btz," though aptly-named for a narrative about international espionage, is likely one of many flavors of a particular category of malware that automatically (and silently) executes when removable media is inserted into a Windows machine.

Trend Micro aggregates information about the threats it finds and publishes the data on its Web site.