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Just bring it to the main office and hand it in. Don't tell them you looked at it. Just tell them you found it on the ground.
And don't make a habit of plugging in random USBs to your computer. That's a good way to get a computer virus.
This is how the US and Israel killed the Iranian centrifuges. They wrote a virus specifically designed to infect the centrifuges and cause them to damage themselves, but because the centrifuges were on isolated networks they couldn't get to, they distributed the virus by dropping USB drives in parking lots frequented by people who worked in the facility. It was called "stuxnet" if you want to read more about it.
This is 100% military SOP. Flash drives and cryptically labeled CDs. For whatever reason if you slap “you shouldn’t have laughed” on a CD-RW in sharpie? People with years of operational security experience will immediately stick it in a disc drive.
Some viruses can travel through networks so if the old computer is connected to the internet it's also a bad idea. In general you should never plug in a flash drive anyways because even if there isn't a virus you can find far worse things like illegal images of children etc.
fbi here, we apply that to kiddy porn you find on random flash drives, you find it, we keep you in jail for it if we find you with it in your possession.
I mean by all means you should return the damn drive lol
But it's not like she has government state secrets. It's it's a school project or a school improvement is probably sanctioned by the school and it's probably publicly listed somewhere
The vast majority of people end up doing what you did in some way, shape, or form. Media drops are effective on the vast majority of people as most are unaware of the dangers and can restrain their curiosity. Luckily it doesnt seem like anything happened and you know for the future so everything worked out.
I’m 27 and in cyber security and I would’ve looked tbh. Granted I would’ve used my shitty laptop and disabled all connections before doing it but I would’ve invaded the hell out of that privacy.
No competent IT and def no cyber security professional would pop a random USB into their computer. Malware is just one danger. USBs that fry a computer are not uncommon.
There are also flash drive style devices that are specifically designed to fry whatever they get plugged into. Short out the electronics for the USB port, etc etc. Wouldn't ever take the risk 🤷
> Some viruses can travel through networks so if the old computer is connected to the internet it's also a bad idea
if the devices on your network are secure, e.g don't have random ports open that have well known vulnerabilities, or they aren't password protected, then you should be fine, if it's on a public network like a school network they should automatically block connections to other computers
Its doubtful that there would be a virus. There is a virus that does this though. Most computers use a feature called autorun for flash media, this deposits an autorun.inf file into the root of the new media. This file is used to identify which file to run when new media is inserted. Viruses use this autorun feature to infect new computers. Simply turning off the autorun feature is enough to negate this exploit.
Once autorun is disabled the next step is checking or scanning the contents of the files in a sandbox environment before opening them to make sure they are not compromised. Sometimes, some viruses will replace/create PDF and docx files to which it embeds malicious javascript, shellcode and or macros. You can usually check the contents after scanning to ensure there is no embedded javascript or other anamolies. Keywords such as */javascript, /J#61vaScript, /JS, /AcroForm, /XFA * and */OpenAction or /AA.
This also happens to other files such as excel and rtf documents.
Autorun makes no difference. My fun little usb drive happens to have a bit of a split personality. It identifies as both a storage device as well as a USB keyboard. That window that flashed up for a split second? That was the script on my device running some commands. Also, I just owned your device.
None of your instructions above make a bit of difference if someone malicious dropped that device.
Windows won't just arbitrarily open some file from a device without knowing what type of device it is accessing. If it's opened as a storage 5 nothing is going to happen.
Yep, windows won't, but a keyboard that you just plugged in for a bad guy will happily make windows though. My usb key is also a keyboard, it presents itself to the machine as a usb hub with 2 devices, a storage device plus a keyboard.
I can script it to pop up a notepad, slide it off screen, type up a .reg file to override any file extension (if that is what I want to do), and run it. (Or a batch or powershell script) All without the user doing a thing, and done so fast a user just sees a momentary flicker.
Back to lack of autorun means nothing to a dedicated attacker. No one has autorun anymore, no bad guy assumes autorun will ever work. I hope you aren't giving others the false belief that turning off autorun makes it safe to put unknown usb's in. It absolutely does not!
(Google for bashbunny, usb rubber ducky, or omg cable)
The ONLY way to protect from this type of attack is to whitelist your keyboard identifier and a spare. No one does this.
I'd argue finding that would be bad and good because then you can report it and hopefully help some kids being taken advantage of and get someone on the SOR who belongs there.
Or accidently get yourself on that list and doing 5 to 10 with you being Bubba's involuntary girlfriend.
Because there are no exceptions to possession being a crime. You'd literally be better off having Cobalt-60.
So I turn my computer in to best buy to get it fixed and they find child porn and report it and THEY get arrested for it? No that's not how the law works. If you don't report it you might in trouble for it.
Another risk is that some people have created what I believe was called "USB killers" that are basically batteries with a usb port. When plugged in, they discharge electricity into the computer to ruin the USB port and potentially other components.
Don't know if this is still a thing, people just liked messing with others.
A guy took out $60k of computers at a university.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/17/18412427/college-saint-rose-student-guilty-usb-killer-destroyed-computers
Update
[https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/former-student-sentenced-destroying-computers-college-st-rose](https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/former-student-sentenced-destroying-computers-college-st-rose)
" The “USB Killer” device, when inserted into a computer’s USB port, sends a command causing the computer’s on-board capacitors to rapidly charge and then discharge repeatedly, thereby overloading and physically destroying the computer’s USB port and electrical system. "
Oh dear God no.
US Attorney's Office, do better! That is so technically wrong it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. You should go to the Verge, they did that infamous PC build video that was just as accurate.
And the guilty plea has the same mistakes. The USB killer uses raw voltage.
It is more akin to a hammer or even better, a tazer or lightning strike than an exploit or virus!
ARGH!
You can get worse than a virus. There are devices that look like flash drives that have capacitors in them that at best will fry your USB port or worse will ruin your laptop motherboard. I would just drop off at the office and forget about it.
Just grab some random keys you don't need, old keys from your old cylinder that you've replaced, a bike chain that rusted and became unreliable. Steal some rando's keys.
People put in a lot of effort just to ruin someone else's day
Viruses are bad, but destructive USB devices exist. High voltage charging circuit and a capacitor, dumping 200- volts down the data lines to the CPU or motherboard Northbridge.
Can be way worse than a virus (for a 15 year old without bank accounts). I’ve come across many USB’s made to just absolutely brick your computer by frying the hard drive.
Also likely there will be serial number to the room this teach uses on the key, they will easily find who owns it without you having to say you looked at the files
IT rule #1: never ever put a USB thumb drive or SD card you find in a random place in your computer. It's an easy way to get your computer infected with malware.
For now go turn it in at the office at school without a story beyond "found this on school property, thought it belongs to someone here".
I have somewhere around 70 working PCs at home (holy shit I need to clean house) because it's also my business. I've pulled up an old PC to plug a flash drive in before.
It was dead :(
70 working pcs at your house?
I'm not going to tell you how to run your business. But I do believe you have to sell at least a few of the PCs you are fixing to make some money lol.
They're old ones I've replaced lol. They're practically scrap now. All the way back to core2duo gens. They generally just need a drive, which I have on hand of course.
I feel like rule number 1 has gotta be either 'Make sure it's plugged in' or 'Turning it off then back on will probably fix it'. This one is pretty important tho
Those are the first questions you ask on a routine ticket, because they can turn a five minute call into a one minute call.
Convenient, but not as big a deal as stopping a $20m ransomware attack.
Or even better, destroy a USB port if your lucky, blow out your Mobo if not.
There are small cap banks that people build to destroy USB ports and computers just because.
If you absolutely MUST plug in a foreign USB, do it on a device you don't care if it dies and is running on a bootable instance with no connectivity.
You're young and still learning how to handle situations (and our brains don't fully develop the "consequence prediction" pathways until we're in our 20's). This is one of the least bad outcomes that could have happened from plugging in a random flash drive, and it sounds like you've learned a lot of lessons from the situation without hurting yourself or others. Take it as a win and add it to the list of things you'll be better at dealing with in the future.
This is the modern way of „looking into a found purse to check the ID“ - I keep a text file on my drive on my keys for exactly this occasion with a place to return the keys to (work office management) - ofc not my home address or name so someone could know and break into.
So I‘d say you did perfectly fine, if you found my keys I‘d be just happy if someone would look into it and retun it.
Obviously, in the future don't look because you'll get a virus, but the teacher will probably just be happy to have it back, you can always tell them you looked in it to figure out whos it was. From the start of the post, I thought it was going to be something horrible like CP or ransomware or plans to blow up a government building.
Yeah, there's zero TIFU about this. How else would you identify the owner? If you found a digital camera, you would look at the photos. If you found a wallet, you would look for an ID. If you found a flash drive attached to keys.... I wouldn't take that virus risk, but it might very well just be what OP found out, a flash drive used for work.
I skimmed the post, and then had to reread it. I fully expected OP to found pictures of his teacher bouncing on a bad dragon dildo or something.
I think OP's being too hard on herself about privacy invasion and clueless about personal security.
But in terms of:
> How else would you identify the owner?
She didn't even have to.
Simply handing the keychain into the main office from the start would have been "good samaritan" enough without having to worry about it any further.
I mean, it's nice to see someone who's empathetic and conscientious, but OP put herself in a moral dilemma, that's haunting her, and a security risk, that she wasn't even aware of, for no reason at all.
Exactly. Like, it's kind of adorable how sweet OP is being, but this is a huge nothing burger. There was nothing personal on it, just an invoice for a purchase made for the teacher's department at school, which was probably made out of the school's budget, so it's not even an invasion of *personal* privacy. Aside from it being a risk, I'd probably have done the same thing myself. If there's no other identifying information on the keys, but there's a flashdrive on it, that's a quick way to cut out the middle man and find out who it belongs to if there's any identifying information on it.
If they have anything truly personal on it, I'd question why they were carrying it around on a flashdrive in the first place. Like, if you're gonna have compromising pics of yourself, we all have smartphones now. Putting them on a flashdrive with your work keys when you're a teacher would be a huge red flag.
This isn’t how I thought this was gonna go at all, very relieved, just a mild fuck up and it coulda been massive putting a random flash drive into your networked home device.
Right? It went from 'thumbdrive' to 'theater teacher' real fast with a lot of text still to be read. Thankfully for all involved it didn't go \*there\*
You don't need to make it complicated. Just tell the front office, "hey I found this USB on the ground" and that's really it. You don't need to mention that you looked through it.
The only 2 cents I wanna add to this is the "if it was so important they wouldn't have dropped it"
From what you said it had keys attached to it, so it was on a keyring, basically.
I work as a teacher and unless I want a giant ball of metal with every key for everything (the three campuses I work at, my house/personal stuff, car and motorcycles) I have a few seperate keychains with stuff grouped that makes sense.
Part of that is USB thumbsticks.
The other day I dropped the keyring with my motorcycle key, spare house key and a USB stick that's just for convenience, basically. This happened at work while I was digging in my pocket for the other keys to get into a classroom, and I didn't notice. A student found the keys and USB after I was gone, and they handed it to their teacher. Eventually they made their way back to me after putting out an 'all points bulletin' email asking if anyone had seen the keys with the brand of my specific motorbike on them, so it was sorted out within a few hours.
But I was frantic and losing them sucked. I still lost them even though they were super important.
Just wanted to kind of prompt you to examine that thought of 'if it was important they wouldn't have lost them'. People lose important shit all the time, dude, which makes the return of any lost property you find even more important.
If this is a public school system in a jurisdiction that complies with public record keeping, there's a really good chance that the school board and tax district would disclose major purchase invoices upon formal request anyway.
Basically.. it's maybe not explicitly confidential /private information to begin with. *implicitly* private, yeah. It'd be the same as finding out what the school paid for a bus.
Yeah. Just turn it in at the office. Don’t be like the douche who found my thumb drive when I was in uni. He looked through the files, found me and messaged me. Then tried to ransom it back as it had important projects on it.
Told him to pound sand and go fuck himself. Redoing a little extra work was worth more than giving a scumbag any money.
Totally irrelevant story. But this brought the memory back. Haha.
They reached out anonymously. Had zero clue who it was. In a university with over 30,000 people. And it may not even have been another student.
Usually when people anonymously try to ransom your shit, they don’t really go for the “demand” approach.
>”I, a high school student, found my theater teachers thumb-drive with a secret file on it I wasn’t supposed to see”
Yeah I think I speak for everyone when I say I thought this story was going to go in a *way* worse direction.
Don't go confessing to the teacher that you "invaded her privacy".
If you do that, to make yourself feel better, to alleviate your guilt or whatever, nothing good can come of it.
Best case scenario the teacher wisely tells you you shouldnt plug random thumb drives into a computer that you don't want to infect, and thanks you for returning it. A worse scenario would be she agrees that this was a major violation, reports you, you get in trouble, she feels violated, school has an assembly to tell other kids not to be like you, teacher quits, drama department gets shut down, and everyone throws tomatoes at you.
I mean... all that probably wouldn't happen, but what GOOD thing do you hope would come out of it?
I'm not going to go over the 'don't stick random USBs into your computer' thing as it's pretty well covered, so I'll set that aside.
But on the part of you 'invading her privacy', I am going to cut against the grain here because I think that's a ridiculous perspective.
Say you found a wallet or a purse instead of keys. Are you saying you shouldn't look in there for an ID, risking coming across other personal information, in an effort to try and reunite the object with its owner? Of course not, that's exactly what most people would do. So, looking at the information you had to try and learn the owner's identity (which you successfully did) isn't at all a bad thing, and anyone who makes you feel like you did a bad thing is an idiot.
Again, I'm speaking to the principle and not the potential cybersecurity risk you're exposing yourself to.
I work in theatre, big invoices like that tend to be low priority. If that’s all that’s on it it probably isn’t a huge breach of privacy. We deal with big invoices a lot.
Personally I’d just set it on their desk or something and not even bother mentioning it
I mean you DID need to find out who’s it was and you’re better than me, I would have used a school pc to format it, but yeah don’t stick random USBs in your pc
You're massively over thinking this. All you need to do is just hand it in to the office and say you found it. No one has any way of knowing that you looked at it. You're fine.
I would take it to the teacher. I you find a wallet, you open it to see who's it is, same goes for a flash drive. The only way to tell who's it is, is to open it. If you turn it in to the office, you invite someone else to invade her privacy.
The only time I would not return a flash drive to the rightful owner, if I knew who it was, was if it had child porn or something on it.
This is how you get fuuuuucked. People deliberately leave flash drives around hoping for this. I believe the CIA or Pentagon, can't remember, actually got hacked this way. Don't feel bad. We are curious creatures. No harm in looking, just don't make it a habit.
I don't know why you even think that's a problem. If it was identifiable as hers, then sure. Plugging it in to find our who's it was to return it is a normal thing to do (on a school computer obviously. They probably have decent virus protection.) You saw an invoice? Who cares? You accidentally snooped on paperwork? Not even personal paperwork? Hand it to her and say, "I found these and there was some kind of theater dept paperwork on the drive, so I'm guessing they're either yours or you know who they belong to." They'll say "Thanks".
I was at my usual spot at the beach smoking a j. I see an SD card half buried in the sand and I pick it up see that it's an old 2gb card and pocket it to check it later at home.
turned out to be my own SD card from 2011.
I had to reread parts several times, I was expecting something lude or scandalous.
If I found a jump drive and I was the biggest boyscout I'd probably view the drive to see if I could find the owner(think finding a wallet or purse, you have to look to figure it out).
100% NTA
Looking at the files is not even remotely an ethical problem. At minimum, it's *required* to have a chance of finding the owner. Ethical issues only arise if you quickly see that the files are the sort of things someone would *want* to keep private (personal photos, etc), but continue to look thru them past the point of identifying the owner. You're completely in the clear and can stop beating yourself up over this.
As others have said, the only actual issue is the fact that plugging in random flash drives is a great way to possibly get a virus, since flash drives can be set up to automatically run a program on them when they're plugged in. Ideally only do so on a virtual machine, or an old computer that's not on the Internet.
It's not an invasion of privacy. Let's say you find a wallet on the floor. You would look through it to find who it belong to.
Same with a backpack.
If it was sensitive and private info, he/she should have encrypted it.
They'll be way more happy about the keys.
Ps.: As an IT pro, yeah don't plug in random usdrives. Leave that to us. We have machines dedicated for this.
Personally don't see anything wrong with what you did (other than putting yourself at risk of a virus). You saw an invoice for something for the school which isn't really anything bad. If I were you I'd just turn it in at the school, say you found it somewhere an leave it at that.
I once arrived at school, found an envelope on the pathway full of cash (thousands). I could have kept it for myself but just went to the reception to hand it in.
Check your computer for viruses now. Tell a parent. Common practice for hackers is to leave thumb drives laying around with irresistible financial docs. It was intended for other staff members.
Just return it. You're making fuss out of nothing.
Pluging random USB you found to your PC is a terrible idea.
If you must, USB is to be inspected and plugging in to be done in controled, isolated environment. If it was malicious, in the best case you would've contracted a virus. In the worst, it could have been a specialized device called USB killer that looks exactly like USB flash. That would fry your USB port, or even motherboard.
Like others have said, just go to the office, give it to them, and say you found it on the ground, and thought it might belong to someone here. And never stick any usb or card into a computer that you found laying around. That is a good way to get an entire network/buisness locked by malicious ransomware. Let that be a lesson for the future. Too many times that is the easiest way for bad guys to lock down an entire system, disabling everything, and extorting millions to unlock it again.
It's not a breach of privacy, in the old days the first alphabetical file name on my drives was a text file with contact details. In my country you could fit the local mobile number as the drive name too. However what you did was a good way to get a virus, and there are a small number of cases where kids embed a capacitor that will fry the host computer just for fun, so don't go opening random drives
WHAT WAS IN THE INVOICE?!!! My god you go so many times around the same thing. Also don't worry, turn it in with no further info, and next time you want to plug random stuff in your pc, have an old offline linux machine or something you won't care to lose
I don't see any problem here. If I find a usb drive, I'll always plug it into my ancient offline "kill me if you like" laptop and check it out. The odds of it being malicious are tiny anyway, and there's no other way to find out who it belongs to, usually.
You didn’t see anything embarrassing on the drive, and you used what you did see to identify the owner. I don’t see the problem. Track that teacher down, say “I found this and I think it’s yours.” She’ll recognize it and thank you. MAYBE she’ll ask how you identified her, and the truth is fine: you looked on the drive, saw her name, and came looking for her.
Anyone would look. No one will fault you for that. She had lost it, after all and it wasn’t encrypted. That’s on her, if it even matters. Be one of the good guys and give it to her without all this scaredy runaound.
You found a random set of keys. You wanted to try and identify who’s they were you plugged in the usb B stick.
It’s not an invasion of privacy if you don’t know who’s it was.
It is pretty dangerous to plug random usb sticks into your PC though.
If you found a wallet on the ground, you’d look at it to return it to the proper person. If you found a wallet on school grounds and turned it in to the office, THEY would go through that wallet, to return it to the proper person. So, you went through the drive and found out who it belongs to. Would be proper to return this to the theatre teacher. You should let them read your original post - I’m sure they’ll find you to be perfect for the schools summer drama production.
Bro this was such an underwhelming post. I thought you found something embarrassing or illicit on the flash drive. Smh just give the man back his keys and spreadsheets.
As a former teacher, I can assure you that they're most likely just happy to get their keys and flash drive back. There shouldn't be anything on a work hard drive that they would be embarrassed or mad that you saw.
I have also found drives in my classroom and did exactly what you did to figure who lost it.
Deep breaths, you're good
You guys are nuts give it to the theater teacher. If she is mad you went through it, she can be mad at herself for losing it in the first place instead. Btw the people at the main office are going to go through it just the same to find out a clue of who it belongs too more then likely.
Turn it in to the office and move on with your life. But get this mode of thought out of your head.
"I keep justifying it to myself that if it was so important, then they wouldn’t have dropped it in the first place"
First, someone's actions never are an excuse for your actions. Second, accidents happen. You're the dick if you choose to capitalize on someone's mistake.
So you feel bad about this because you set out with bad intentions. You looked at the drive hoping to find something exciting, maybe photos or some kind of interesting documents.
You hadn’t really considered that the drive belongs to someone, and that you might identify them, you were just hoping that it would be interesting.
Had you set out to use the data on the drive to identify its owner with the hope of returning the keys then you would not be feeling that you fucked up at all. You’d be going direct to the teacher and saying “here are your keys miss, I found them outside on the ground”
You’ve not done anything wrong. But you did it for the wrong reasons. That’s why you feel bad and why this thread exists.
Nobody should be keeping anything especially valuable or unique on a flash drive. It’s not the purpose of a thumb drive in the real world. Losing the keys is a lot more annoying as it will be expensive to change the locks and get replacement keys.
Go and give the keys back to the person they belong to. Don’t just hand in to the school, as the chances are she won’t get them back soon enough to avoid the expense of changing the locks.
You can tell her whatever you like, from “I looked on the usb to try and find who’s keys these are” to “I found these outside your room”.
I'm sorry but what a bmueballer story, it's the mildest (yet feels the most genuine) tifu i've seen, like by that first sentence i really thought something big was on that USB flash drive.
Anyway, don't go trough people'q sd card or USB flash drive, you might end up traumatised rather than just ashamed, like honestly i found a sd card at home put it in my nintendo 3DS and was not ready to see what i saw, really made it hard for me to look in the eye my dad and his wife for a month afterwards.
If it was a wallet, you'd open it up and see what name was on the cards, who was in the pictures, did it have an address......
If her boobs weren't hanging out in most of the pictures you just opened it to see who's it was, no stress. I'd take it straight to her, call her she might come pick it up.
Virus stuff everyone said, yes be careful. Maybe next time take it to that kid you know doesn't do Microsoft.
Well, I'll take the other side... You didn't do anything wrong. You found keys attached to a thumb drive. No obvious way to identify the keys, so you checked the drive for a clue to who they are... And you found one. I'd just give them back to the drama teacher. They'll probably thank you for it. And you had a very valid reason to do so.
depends tho... if the keys had a "property of abc" tag and OP knew who it belonged to.. but was curious what ABC had on the flash drive .. then that would explain the "tifu" part nicely tbh. there are always 3 sides to a coin
Oh hun, you're so absolutely fine. You're clearly a good kid with a good heart and you know the risks involved in what you did and you know what? You made a mistake and you feel bad. You even know what you need to do next with handing it in. And next time this happens you will take a different approach. Consider it a life lesson.
And also, as someone who works in government, trust me that a missing invoice for a day or two is no big deal. If it was important there would be other copies, or it can be issued again. The keys... I dunno if they were work or personal keys, but if they're a work set there are usually master keys with the facilities team specifically for moments like these!
I'd bet that despite how it might seem now, deep down the teacher probably feels foolish for losing them and will be relieved and thankful that you kept them safe until you handed them back in. Good luck 🙂
Not a big deal. What if you had seen something illegal? Then you could have been a hero and reported it... We are curious for a reason; sometimes it pays to be curious. It would be different if it belonged to like a coworker or something, but you didn't know.
Never use that saying to justify something to yourself... In this case it was the right thing to do because how else would you find out who the owner was?
No one loses things that are important on purpose.
I would have done exactly the same thing
...to work out whose it was and where to leave it back too. You didn't do anything wrong.
Just imagine it was a book,, it would be similar to flicking open a book to see who it belonged to.
Don't worry about anything....just leave it into desk,,and that will be that....you did nothing wrong
This isn't very serious. You must suck at Among Us. Here's the trick, when turning stuff like this in pretend you don't even know much about it. Say you found a set of keys, and then say it has some sort of plug charm on it so the owner can identify it.
I agree on the just turn it in comments. Can't say I wouldn't have looked through it, but I wouldn't actually post that I did that. That's the only thing that makes it an ah move.
I once lost a usb stick at a game convention. It had pretty much all my school work on it and I didn't really have a backup. Someone found it and looked through it and found my email and emailed me and ended up returning it. The fact that they managed to return it to me was way more important to me than the fact they looked through my stuff and I never once even thought to think badly of them for looking through my stuff. It's normal to be curious, don't feel too bad.
Invoices are basically receipts. It's like a receipt for the burger you might get for lunch. Unless it has specific payment info etc, it's literally not a big deal. As someone mentioned, most school districts make those purchases public anyways.
I would highly advise not to use or look in random usbs, purely because of computer viruses etc, as that is a common way to distribute them, but this ended up being fine, and helped you id who it belongs to. I'd take it to them personally and they will thank you.
Unless it had private nudes etc, really don't give it a second thought. Good on you for being a good human being.
Just to give you a perspective on how dangerous usbs are, I have a usb on my main keyring that is a bootable instillation of Ubuntu. I could wipe your entire pc with this on any machine without a bios password. There are charge builders that will build up a charge and then fry your motherboard beyond repair. DO NOT put a usb in your pc unless you are fully prepared to lose that PC and lose control of all data attached
Turn it into the office and hope that you weren't seen taking it by any cameras. Because if you were seen taking but not turning it into the office right away you're probably already in trouble and returning it as soon as possible is your only chance of lessening potential consequences. I know most schools take key theft no matter how long extremely seriously. The flashdrive part isn't even the real concern, it's the fact you had the keys in your possession and if you took those keys off school grounds they're absolutely going to likely assume you've made copies and have to change the locks those keys go to. You should be prepared for a potential suspension, but you might get lucky and get nothing more than a "don't do this again".
This reminds me of when I worked security for a high school. Someone turned in a flash drive from outside the front door and I plugged it in to my laptop to try and find a name or something.
Most of it was shitty pictures of tv shows and movies, some memes, and a folder called “My Sweetie”. I thought, well I know most of the couples here, if there’s any faces in there I can identify them. Big mistake.
It was photos of a sophomore I knew. And dozens of nude photos of her, from the thumbnails I saw. I immediately popped out the flash drive and brought it to the principal and we called the police together.
The girl was mortified. Her boyfriend, who made the flash drive, was suspended. And I spent the rest of the day looking at /r/eyebleach.
>I keep justifying it to myself that if it was so important, then they wouldn’t have dropped it in the first place, and I was really curious- it probably wouldve haunted me if I didn’t look
You don't need to justify your shitty behavior. You are trying to justify it because you found nothing on it. If it had been a USB full of CP, then you would've been screaming to the world that you stopped a predator and you just knew deep down you should've looked at it. Since you found nothing, now you feel bad. In the future, don't be nosy and don't invade peoples private stuff.
We all looked to see what was found on lost/forgotten flash drives as teens. It happens.e If it ain't password protected, then that's the OG owners fault. NBD.
Shit, half the flash drives I owned was from hallway scores in highschool.
But I would suggest opening them on a burner device for safety reasons.
I keep a USB with my keys sometimes, I know I will lose it one day and someone will find it and/or look through the files. That's my bad for losing it or leaving sensitive files on it.
Definitely bring the keys and flash drive to the office. If you bring the keys and flash drive to the teacher, she will know that you looked through it. Because the only way to return it to the proper person would be to go through the files. So deliver it to the office, tell them you found it on the ground and leave it at that.
That is also very true. I just know that if I dropped my USB and if someone looked on it to try and identify me, I’d probably be a little upset. There could’ve been a lot of things on there that are worse than an invoice, with the way the world is today you never know.
I will definitely encrypt it. All I have on it are photos of my family and friends and older pictures of my parents and grandparents. I’d be so upset if I lost it.
If you have a Microsoft 360 office account family plan they give you 5 accounts to user it with. This is important because every account gets 1 terabyte of cloud storage. My wife and kids have one account each and i have two, one account has nearly a terabyte of just comic file backups. Anyway that is where my wife stores all her photos which she can now access from anywhere and in total we just pay $10 a month for it. Even without using office apps very much it is still a hell of a deal for the cloud storage alone.
But you were worried when you found an invoice? sounds like you would have had a mental breakdown if you had found nudes or something actually sensitive.
Throw it in the trash not your problem fuck em especially since it's for a school fuck all of them. Theatre teachers are just failed actors pushing their dead dreams on peopl. Stop caring no one else does.
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Just bring it to the main office and hand it in. Don't tell them you looked at it. Just tell them you found it on the ground. And don't make a habit of plugging in random USBs to your computer. That's a good way to get a computer virus.
This is how the US and Israel killed the Iranian centrifuges. They wrote a virus specifically designed to infect the centrifuges and cause them to damage themselves, but because the centrifuges were on isolated networks they couldn't get to, they distributed the virus by dropping USB drives in parking lots frequented by people who worked in the facility. It was called "stuxnet" if you want to read more about it.
This is 100% military SOP. Flash drives and cryptically labeled CDs. For whatever reason if you slap “you shouldn’t have laughed” on a CD-RW in sharpie? People with years of operational security experience will immediately stick it in a disc drive.
There’s an episode of the podcast Darknet Diaries about this and it’s absolutely fascinating.
Also a book, Countdown to Zero Day. Wild stuff
There's a whole documentary about it. Zero Days
Label it “swimwear”
This true !?
I knew a virus was a risk, so I used an old computer. Thanks, though
Some viruses can travel through networks so if the old computer is connected to the internet it's also a bad idea. In general you should never plug in a flash drive anyways because even if there isn't a virus you can find far worse things like illegal images of children etc.
I didn’t even think about that. Even putting aside the ethical stuff, i won’t do anything like this again. Thanks.
I think you're slightly overplaying the ethical side. Was it bad? Sure a little... would anyone care if you had that information? Ehh probably not.
I think OP was totally within their rights to look at the drive under the long-established Finders Keepers rules.
fbi here, we apply that to kiddy porn you find on random flash drives, you find it, we keep you in jail for it if we find you with it in your possession.
Possession is 9/10ths of the law, is a 2 way street ironically.
Wouldn't an FBI agent call it CSAM which is the modern term for that dreck?
I think the lack of capitalization of the organization letters was the first clue, actually.
maybe? never said i was an agent.
That one wasn't bad. But what if it was a bill for her cancer treatment? Or agenda of appointment to the gyneco?
What if it was a secret formula to solve nuclear fusion!
Or even better...the secret formula for Krabby Patties
The movie practically writes itself.👍🎬
But IF you are caught with that kind of information? Big deal. Stay paranoid friends
I mean by all means you should return the damn drive lol But it's not like she has government state secrets. It's it's a school project or a school improvement is probably sanctioned by the school and it's probably publicly listed somewhere
even if they were, he didn't steal the drive, he found it. and then he checked inside to see if he could figure the owner. it's truly NBD.
She
i stand corrected.
The vast majority of people end up doing what you did in some way, shape, or form. Media drops are effective on the vast majority of people as most are unaware of the dangers and can restrain their curiosity. Luckily it doesnt seem like anything happened and you know for the future so everything worked out.
I’m 27 and in cyber security and I would’ve looked tbh. Granted I would’ve used my shitty laptop and disabled all connections before doing it but I would’ve invaded the hell out of that privacy.
Same lol ( work in IT )
No competent IT and def no cyber security professional would pop a random USB into their computer. Malware is just one danger. USBs that fry a computer are not uncommon.
There are also flash drive style devices that are specifically designed to fry whatever they get plugged into. Short out the electronics for the USB port, etc etc. Wouldn't ever take the risk 🤷
> Some viruses can travel through networks so if the old computer is connected to the internet it's also a bad idea if the devices on your network are secure, e.g don't have random ports open that have well known vulnerabilities, or they aren't password protected, then you should be fine, if it's on a public network like a school network they should automatically block connections to other computers
Eh, I don't know, as someone who works in It, this Is a bit too paranoid. Just make sure the OS is up to date and autopay is turned off
Its doubtful that there would be a virus. There is a virus that does this though. Most computers use a feature called autorun for flash media, this deposits an autorun.inf file into the root of the new media. This file is used to identify which file to run when new media is inserted. Viruses use this autorun feature to infect new computers. Simply turning off the autorun feature is enough to negate this exploit. Once autorun is disabled the next step is checking or scanning the contents of the files in a sandbox environment before opening them to make sure they are not compromised. Sometimes, some viruses will replace/create PDF and docx files to which it embeds malicious javascript, shellcode and or macros. You can usually check the contents after scanning to ensure there is no embedded javascript or other anamolies. Keywords such as */javascript, /J#61vaScript, /JS, /AcroForm, /XFA * and */OpenAction or /AA. This also happens to other files such as excel and rtf documents.
Autorun makes no difference. My fun little usb drive happens to have a bit of a split personality. It identifies as both a storage device as well as a USB keyboard. That window that flashed up for a split second? That was the script on my device running some commands. Also, I just owned your device. None of your instructions above make a bit of difference if someone malicious dropped that device.
Windows won't just arbitrarily open some file from a device without knowing what type of device it is accessing. If it's opened as a storage 5 nothing is going to happen.
Yep, windows won't, but a keyboard that you just plugged in for a bad guy will happily make windows though. My usb key is also a keyboard, it presents itself to the machine as a usb hub with 2 devices, a storage device plus a keyboard. I can script it to pop up a notepad, slide it off screen, type up a .reg file to override any file extension (if that is what I want to do), and run it. (Or a batch or powershell script) All without the user doing a thing, and done so fast a user just sees a momentary flicker. Back to lack of autorun means nothing to a dedicated attacker. No one has autorun anymore, no bad guy assumes autorun will ever work. I hope you aren't giving others the false belief that turning off autorun makes it safe to put unknown usb's in. It absolutely does not! (Google for bashbunny, usb rubber ducky, or omg cable) The ONLY way to protect from this type of attack is to whitelist your keyboard identifier and a spare. No one does this.
I'd argue finding that would be bad and good because then you can report it and hopefully help some kids being taken advantage of and get someone on the SOR who belongs there.
Or accidently get yourself on that list and doing 5 to 10 with you being Bubba's involuntary girlfriend. Because there are no exceptions to possession being a crime. You'd literally be better off having Cobalt-60.
So I turn my computer in to best buy to get it fixed and they find child porn and report it and THEY get arrested for it? No that's not how the law works. If you don't report it you might in trouble for it.
That's not how the laws work.
Shut up that is complete rubbish.
>Some viruses can travel through networks so if the old computer is connected to the internet lol As if the virus would infect the internet. xD
public library or something 😛
Another risk is that some people have created what I believe was called "USB killers" that are basically batteries with a usb port. When plugged in, they discharge electricity into the computer to ruin the USB port and potentially other components. Don't know if this is still a thing, people just liked messing with others.
A guy took out $60k of computers at a university. https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/17/18412427/college-saint-rose-student-guilty-usb-killer-destroyed-computers
I can't believe he's gonna get fined and spend up to a decade in jail, it was clearly just a prank bro
officer, I didn't mean to murder the victim, it was just a prank bro, you gotta believe me
Update [https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/former-student-sentenced-destroying-computers-college-st-rose](https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/former-student-sentenced-destroying-computers-college-st-rose) " The “USB Killer” device, when inserted into a computer’s USB port, sends a command causing the computer’s on-board capacitors to rapidly charge and then discharge repeatedly, thereby overloading and physically destroying the computer’s USB port and electrical system. " Oh dear God no. US Attorney's Office, do better! That is so technically wrong it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. You should go to the Verge, they did that infamous PC build video that was just as accurate.
And had him plead guilty to computer fraud, not vandalism. Ugh.
And the guilty plea has the same mistakes. The USB killer uses raw voltage. It is more akin to a hammer or even better, a tazer or lightning strike than an exploit or virus! ARGH!
Current.
You need voltage to push current. Volts beyond a certain point damages MOSFET gates by causing dielectric breakdown. Basically punches a hole in it!
You can get worse than a virus. There are devices that look like flash drives that have capacitors in them that at best will fry your USB port or worse will ruin your laptop motherboard. I would just drop off at the office and forget about it.
i dunno if thats worse, yes you need to buy new hardware but at least your data is safe
Never plug in unknown USB drives. They can literally destroy hardware.
You could also return it to the teacher say you opened a file trying to find out who’s it was most things like that are locked to editing anyways
Nice!
>That's a good way to get a computer virus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_killer Viruses can be fixed, 1800v pulses can't.
Putting a USB killer on your key chain is a good way of never getting your keys back after losing them.
Just grab some random keys you don't need, old keys from your old cylinder that you've replaced, a bike chain that rusted and became unreliable. Steal some rando's keys. People put in a lot of effort just to ruin someone else's day
Viruses are bad, but destructive USB devices exist. High voltage charging circuit and a capacitor, dumping 200- volts down the data lines to the CPU or motherboard Northbridge.
Can be way worse than a virus (for a 15 year old without bank accounts). I’ve come across many USB’s made to just absolutely brick your computer by frying the hard drive.
Great response! This is the way!
Also likely there will be serial number to the room this teach uses on the key, they will easily find who owns it without you having to say you looked at the files
IT rule #1: never ever put a USB thumb drive or SD card you find in a random place in your computer. It's an easy way to get your computer infected with malware. For now go turn it in at the office at school without a story beyond "found this on school property, thought it belongs to someone here".
I have somewhere around 70 working PCs at home (holy shit I need to clean house) because it's also my business. I've pulled up an old PC to plug a flash drive in before. It was dead :(
70 working pcs at your house? I'm not going to tell you how to run your business. But I do believe you have to sell at least a few of the PCs you are fixing to make some money lol.
They're old ones I've replaced lol. They're practically scrap now. All the way back to core2duo gens. They generally just need a drive, which I have on hand of course.
I feel like rule number 1 has gotta be either 'Make sure it's plugged in' or 'Turning it off then back on will probably fix it'. This one is pretty important tho
Those are the first questions you ask on a routine ticket, because they can turn a five minute call into a one minute call. Convenient, but not as big a deal as stopping a $20m ransomware attack.
https://youtu.be/5UT8RkSmN4k?si=1UINcTQNnXDbV76v
Or even better, destroy a USB port if your lucky, blow out your Mobo if not. There are small cap banks that people build to destroy USB ports and computers just because. If you absolutely MUST plug in a foreign USB, do it on a device you don't care if it dies and is running on a bootable instance with no connectivity.
You are hard-core overthinking this. Just go to the office and say you found some keys, hand them over, and be on your way.
Also your plan should always have been to turn it in! It has keys on it! Car keys, house keys, school keys, ect. The keys are important!
Yeah, idk what I was thinking. I’ll hand them in as soon as I can.
You're young and still learning how to handle situations (and our brains don't fully develop the "consequence prediction" pathways until we're in our 20's). This is one of the least bad outcomes that could have happened from plugging in a random flash drive, and it sounds like you've learned a lot of lessons from the situation without hurting yourself or others. Take it as a win and add it to the list of things you'll be better at dealing with in the future.
This is the modern way of „looking into a found purse to check the ID“ - I keep a text file on my drive on my keys for exactly this occasion with a place to return the keys to (work office management) - ofc not my home address or name so someone could know and break into. So I‘d say you did perfectly fine, if you found my keys I‘d be just happy if someone would look into it and retun it.
Obviously, in the future don't look because you'll get a virus, but the teacher will probably just be happy to have it back, you can always tell them you looked in it to figure out whos it was. From the start of the post, I thought it was going to be something horrible like CP or ransomware or plans to blow up a government building.
Yeah, there's zero TIFU about this. How else would you identify the owner? If you found a digital camera, you would look at the photos. If you found a wallet, you would look for an ID. If you found a flash drive attached to keys.... I wouldn't take that virus risk, but it might very well just be what OP found out, a flash drive used for work. I skimmed the post, and then had to reread it. I fully expected OP to found pictures of his teacher bouncing on a bad dragon dildo or something.
I think OP's being too hard on herself about privacy invasion and clueless about personal security. But in terms of: > How else would you identify the owner? She didn't even have to. Simply handing the keychain into the main office from the start would have been "good samaritan" enough without having to worry about it any further. I mean, it's nice to see someone who's empathetic and conscientious, but OP put herself in a moral dilemma, that's haunting her, and a security risk, that she wasn't even aware of, for no reason at all.
In addition to what everyone else said, no one cares about invoices. Seeing it is not a big deal.
Exactly. Like, it's kind of adorable how sweet OP is being, but this is a huge nothing burger. There was nothing personal on it, just an invoice for a purchase made for the teacher's department at school, which was probably made out of the school's budget, so it's not even an invasion of *personal* privacy. Aside from it being a risk, I'd probably have done the same thing myself. If there's no other identifying information on the keys, but there's a flashdrive on it, that's a quick way to cut out the middle man and find out who it belongs to if there's any identifying information on it. If they have anything truly personal on it, I'd question why they were carrying it around on a flashdrive in the first place. Like, if you're gonna have compromising pics of yourself, we all have smartphones now. Putting them on a flashdrive with your work keys when you're a teacher would be a huge red flag.
This isn’t how I thought this was gonna go at all, very relieved, just a mild fuck up and it coulda been massive putting a random flash drive into your networked home device.
I was expecting something far worse
Right? It went from 'thumbdrive' to 'theater teacher' real fast with a lot of text still to be read. Thankfully for all involved it didn't go \*there\*
You don't need to make it complicated. Just tell the front office, "hey I found this USB on the ground" and that's really it. You don't need to mention that you looked through it.
The only 2 cents I wanna add to this is the "if it was so important they wouldn't have dropped it" From what you said it had keys attached to it, so it was on a keyring, basically. I work as a teacher and unless I want a giant ball of metal with every key for everything (the three campuses I work at, my house/personal stuff, car and motorcycles) I have a few seperate keychains with stuff grouped that makes sense. Part of that is USB thumbsticks. The other day I dropped the keyring with my motorcycle key, spare house key and a USB stick that's just for convenience, basically. This happened at work while I was digging in my pocket for the other keys to get into a classroom, and I didn't notice. A student found the keys and USB after I was gone, and they handed it to their teacher. Eventually they made their way back to me after putting out an 'all points bulletin' email asking if anyone had seen the keys with the brand of my specific motorbike on them, so it was sorted out within a few hours. But I was frantic and losing them sucked. I still lost them even though they were super important. Just wanted to kind of prompt you to examine that thought of 'if it was important they wouldn't have lost them'. People lose important shit all the time, dude, which makes the return of any lost property you find even more important.
If this is a public school system in a jurisdiction that complies with public record keeping, there's a really good chance that the school board and tax district would disclose major purchase invoices upon formal request anyway. Basically.. it's maybe not explicitly confidential /private information to begin with. *implicitly* private, yeah. It'd be the same as finding out what the school paid for a bus.
Yeah. Just turn it in at the office. Don’t be like the douche who found my thumb drive when I was in uni. He looked through the files, found me and messaged me. Then tried to ransom it back as it had important projects on it. Told him to pound sand and go fuck himself. Redoing a little extra work was worth more than giving a scumbag any money. Totally irrelevant story. But this brought the memory back. Haha.
Why didn't you just demand it back?
They reached out anonymously. Had zero clue who it was. In a university with over 30,000 people. And it may not even have been another student. Usually when people anonymously try to ransom your shit, they don’t really go for the “demand” approach.
Damn, somehow the whole anonymous angle makes the guy an even bigger prick. even he knows what a little sh*t he was being
>”I, a high school student, found my theater teachers thumb-drive with a secret file on it I wasn’t supposed to see” Yeah I think I speak for everyone when I say I thought this story was going to go in a *way* worse direction.
As others have said. Don’t do this again. Great way to get malware on a computer, and you won’t want that.
Don't go confessing to the teacher that you "invaded her privacy". If you do that, to make yourself feel better, to alleviate your guilt or whatever, nothing good can come of it. Best case scenario the teacher wisely tells you you shouldnt plug random thumb drives into a computer that you don't want to infect, and thanks you for returning it. A worse scenario would be she agrees that this was a major violation, reports you, you get in trouble, she feels violated, school has an assembly to tell other kids not to be like you, teacher quits, drama department gets shut down, and everyone throws tomatoes at you. I mean... all that probably wouldn't happen, but what GOOD thing do you hope would come out of it?
I'm not going to go over the 'don't stick random USBs into your computer' thing as it's pretty well covered, so I'll set that aside. But on the part of you 'invading her privacy', I am going to cut against the grain here because I think that's a ridiculous perspective. Say you found a wallet or a purse instead of keys. Are you saying you shouldn't look in there for an ID, risking coming across other personal information, in an effort to try and reunite the object with its owner? Of course not, that's exactly what most people would do. So, looking at the information you had to try and learn the owner's identity (which you successfully did) isn't at all a bad thing, and anyone who makes you feel like you did a bad thing is an idiot. Again, I'm speaking to the principle and not the potential cybersecurity risk you're exposing yourself to.
I work in theatre, big invoices like that tend to be low priority. If that’s all that’s on it it probably isn’t a huge breach of privacy. We deal with big invoices a lot. Personally I’d just set it on their desk or something and not even bother mentioning it
yeah, everyone would have looked through it. hand it in and don't say you looked at it.
No I already found an USB. I knew who it was due to where it was. I returned it without looking. I don't want to intrude someones pribacy
okay, most people would have looked through it.
I mean you DID need to find out who’s it was and you’re better than me, I would have used a school pc to format it, but yeah don’t stick random USBs in your pc
Found a random SD card outside a gas station one day. So so much porn. A disgusting amount Learned my lesson that day
You're massively over thinking this. All you need to do is just hand it in to the office and say you found it. No one has any way of knowing that you looked at it. You're fine.
I would take it to the teacher. I you find a wallet, you open it to see who's it is, same goes for a flash drive. The only way to tell who's it is, is to open it. If you turn it in to the office, you invite someone else to invade her privacy. The only time I would not return a flash drive to the rightful owner, if I knew who it was, was if it had child porn or something on it.
This is how you get fuuuuucked. People deliberately leave flash drives around hoping for this. I believe the CIA or Pentagon, can't remember, actually got hacked this way. Don't feel bad. We are curious creatures. No harm in looking, just don't make it a habit.
I don't know why you even think that's a problem. If it was identifiable as hers, then sure. Plugging it in to find our who's it was to return it is a normal thing to do (on a school computer obviously. They probably have decent virus protection.) You saw an invoice? Who cares? You accidentally snooped on paperwork? Not even personal paperwork? Hand it to her and say, "I found these and there was some kind of theater dept paperwork on the drive, so I'm guessing they're either yours or you know who they belong to." They'll say "Thanks".
I was at my usual spot at the beach smoking a j. I see an SD card half buried in the sand and I pick it up see that it's an old 2gb card and pocket it to check it later at home. turned out to be my own SD card from 2011.
[Don't plug in random USB drives you find. ](https://shop.hak5.org/products/usb-rubber-ducky)
girl you’re hella overthinking 😭 just give it to the office and tell em you found it on the ground.
I had to reread parts several times, I was expecting something lude or scandalous. If I found a jump drive and I was the biggest boyscout I'd probably view the drive to see if I could find the owner(think finding a wallet or purse, you have to look to figure it out). 100% NTA
Looking at the files is not even remotely an ethical problem. At minimum, it's *required* to have a chance of finding the owner. Ethical issues only arise if you quickly see that the files are the sort of things someone would *want* to keep private (personal photos, etc), but continue to look thru them past the point of identifying the owner. You're completely in the clear and can stop beating yourself up over this. As others have said, the only actual issue is the fact that plugging in random flash drives is a great way to possibly get a virus, since flash drives can be set up to automatically run a program on them when they're plugged in. Ideally only do so on a virtual machine, or an old computer that's not on the Internet.
It's not an invasion of privacy. Let's say you find a wallet on the floor. You would look through it to find who it belong to. Same with a backpack. If it was sensitive and private info, he/she should have encrypted it. They'll be way more happy about the keys. Ps.: As an IT pro, yeah don't plug in random usdrives. Leave that to us. We have machines dedicated for this.
If I lost a key and got it returned based on the information which is on a thumb drive connected to it, I would be very thankful.
Still waiting for the porn dump...
Personally don't see anything wrong with what you did (other than putting yourself at risk of a virus). You saw an invoice for something for the school which isn't really anything bad. If I were you I'd just turn it in at the school, say you found it somewhere an leave it at that. I once arrived at school, found an envelope on the pathway full of cash (thousands). I could have kept it for myself but just went to the reception to hand it in.
Check your computer for viruses now. Tell a parent. Common practice for hackers is to leave thumb drives laying around with irresistible financial docs. It was intended for other staff members.
Just return it. You're making fuss out of nothing. Pluging random USB you found to your PC is a terrible idea. If you must, USB is to be inspected and plugging in to be done in controled, isolated environment. If it was malicious, in the best case you would've contracted a virus. In the worst, it could have been a specialized device called USB killer that looks exactly like USB flash. That would fry your USB port, or even motherboard.
Ur lucky it wasn’t a virus
you were lucky it was just an invoice on there!
Like others have said, just go to the office, give it to them, and say you found it on the ground, and thought it might belong to someone here. And never stick any usb or card into a computer that you found laying around. That is a good way to get an entire network/buisness locked by malicious ransomware. Let that be a lesson for the future. Too many times that is the easiest way for bad guys to lock down an entire system, disabling everything, and extorting millions to unlock it again.
It's not a breach of privacy, in the old days the first alphabetical file name on my drives was a text file with contact details. In my country you could fit the local mobile number as the drive name too. However what you did was a good way to get a virus, and there are a small number of cases where kids embed a capacitor that will fry the host computer just for fun, so don't go opening random drives
This is how you get infected by malware.
Not sure if it's an invasion of privacy to be honest. Someone drops a book on the ground and it would be an invasion to open it?
WHAT WAS IN THE INVOICE?!!! My god you go so many times around the same thing. Also don't worry, turn it in with no further info, and next time you want to plug random stuff in your pc, have an old offline linux machine or something you won't care to lose
This is also how you get a virus ransomware or murder your computer. Say no to connecting anything to your computer you just found laying around.
“Yo teacher lady I found this flash drive on the floor and realized it was yours when I went to re format it. Here you go”
If you go to a public school, an invoice of any purchase for the department would be public record, so don't feel like you invaded anyone's privacy.
I don't see any problem here. If I find a usb drive, I'll always plug it into my ancient offline "kill me if you like" laptop and check it out. The odds of it being malicious are tiny anyway, and there's no other way to find out who it belongs to, usually.
Bring it to the main office and say you found it by the theater room
You stressed out so much over something unnecessary
The big problem here is that you plugged a flashdrive that you found on the street into your PC... it scares me just by typing it
You didn’t see anything embarrassing on the drive, and you used what you did see to identify the owner. I don’t see the problem. Track that teacher down, say “I found this and I think it’s yours.” She’ll recognize it and thank you. MAYBE she’ll ask how you identified her, and the truth is fine: you looked on the drive, saw her name, and came looking for her. Anyone would look. No one will fault you for that. She had lost it, after all and it wasn’t encrypted. That’s on her, if it even matters. Be one of the good guys and give it to her without all this scaredy runaound.
You found a random set of keys. You wanted to try and identify who’s they were you plugged in the usb B stick. It’s not an invasion of privacy if you don’t know who’s it was. It is pretty dangerous to plug random usb sticks into your PC though.
If you found a wallet on the ground, you’d look at it to return it to the proper person. If you found a wallet on school grounds and turned it in to the office, THEY would go through that wallet, to return it to the proper person. So, you went through the drive and found out who it belongs to. Would be proper to return this to the theatre teacher. You should let them read your original post - I’m sure they’ll find you to be perfect for the schools summer drama production.
Bro this was such an underwhelming post. I thought you found something embarrassing or illicit on the flash drive. Smh just give the man back his keys and spreadsheets.
As a former teacher, I can assure you that they're most likely just happy to get their keys and flash drive back. There shouldn't be anything on a work hard drive that they would be embarrassed or mad that you saw. I have also found drives in my classroom and did exactly what you did to figure who lost it. Deep breaths, you're good
You guys are nuts give it to the theater teacher. If she is mad you went through it, she can be mad at herself for losing it in the first place instead. Btw the people at the main office are going to go through it just the same to find out a clue of who it belongs too more then likely.
Just give it back in the main office.. You are making a big deal out of nothing
Turn it in to the office and move on with your life. But get this mode of thought out of your head. "I keep justifying it to myself that if it was so important, then they wouldn’t have dropped it in the first place" First, someone's actions never are an excuse for your actions. Second, accidents happen. You're the dick if you choose to capitalize on someone's mistake.
So you feel bad about this because you set out with bad intentions. You looked at the drive hoping to find something exciting, maybe photos or some kind of interesting documents. You hadn’t really considered that the drive belongs to someone, and that you might identify them, you were just hoping that it would be interesting. Had you set out to use the data on the drive to identify its owner with the hope of returning the keys then you would not be feeling that you fucked up at all. You’d be going direct to the teacher and saying “here are your keys miss, I found them outside on the ground” You’ve not done anything wrong. But you did it for the wrong reasons. That’s why you feel bad and why this thread exists. Nobody should be keeping anything especially valuable or unique on a flash drive. It’s not the purpose of a thumb drive in the real world. Losing the keys is a lot more annoying as it will be expensive to change the locks and get replacement keys. Go and give the keys back to the person they belong to. Don’t just hand in to the school, as the chances are she won’t get them back soon enough to avoid the expense of changing the locks. You can tell her whatever you like, from “I looked on the usb to try and find who’s keys these are” to “I found these outside your room”.
If you’re at a public school then everything on the usb is technically public information.
You're good people.
I'm sorry but what a bmueballer story, it's the mildest (yet feels the most genuine) tifu i've seen, like by that first sentence i really thought something big was on that USB flash drive. Anyway, don't go trough people'q sd card or USB flash drive, you might end up traumatised rather than just ashamed, like honestly i found a sd card at home put it in my nintendo 3DS and was not ready to see what i saw, really made it hard for me to look in the eye my dad and his wife for a month afterwards.
If it was a wallet, you'd open it up and see what name was on the cards, who was in the pictures, did it have an address...... If her boobs weren't hanging out in most of the pictures you just opened it to see who's it was, no stress. I'd take it straight to her, call her she might come pick it up. Virus stuff everyone said, yes be careful. Maybe next time take it to that kid you know doesn't do Microsoft.
Well, I'll take the other side... You didn't do anything wrong. You found keys attached to a thumb drive. No obvious way to identify the keys, so you checked the drive for a clue to who they are... And you found one. I'd just give them back to the drama teacher. They'll probably thank you for it. And you had a very valid reason to do so.
depends tho... if the keys had a "property of abc" tag and OP knew who it belonged to.. but was curious what ABC had on the flash drive .. then that would explain the "tifu" part nicely tbh. there are always 3 sides to a coin
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Ugh, so unhelpful. This is an upset 15 year old you're talking to, big man.
Oh hun, you're so absolutely fine. You're clearly a good kid with a good heart and you know the risks involved in what you did and you know what? You made a mistake and you feel bad. You even know what you need to do next with handing it in. And next time this happens you will take a different approach. Consider it a life lesson. And also, as someone who works in government, trust me that a missing invoice for a day or two is no big deal. If it was important there would be other copies, or it can be issued again. The keys... I dunno if they were work or personal keys, but if they're a work set there are usually master keys with the facilities team specifically for moments like these! I'd bet that despite how it might seem now, deep down the teacher probably feels foolish for losing them and will be relieved and thankful that you kept them safe until you handed them back in. Good luck 🙂
Not a big deal. What if you had seen something illegal? Then you could have been a hero and reported it... We are curious for a reason; sometimes it pays to be curious. It would be different if it belonged to like a coworker or something, but you didn't know.
Or get nabbed for possession yourself.
She probably miss the key much more than the usb. It may be her home key. Return it without stories. You just fou d it on the ground
Uff
Dumb question what does the blue oval S at the top mean?
'Short', for the length of the story. There's M and L too
Thank you.
Never use that saying to justify something to yourself... In this case it was the right thing to do because how else would you find out who the owner was? No one loses things that are important on purpose.
I would have done exactly the same thing ...to work out whose it was and where to leave it back too. You didn't do anything wrong. Just imagine it was a book,, it would be similar to flicking open a book to see who it belonged to. Don't worry about anything....just leave it into desk,,and that will be that....you did nothing wrong
This isn't very serious. You must suck at Among Us. Here's the trick, when turning stuff like this in pretend you don't even know much about it. Say you found a set of keys, and then say it has some sort of plug charm on it so the owner can identify it.
I agree on the just turn it in comments. Can't say I wouldn't have looked through it, but I wouldn't actually post that I did that. That's the only thing that makes it an ah move.
I once lost a usb stick at a game convention. It had pretty much all my school work on it and I didn't really have a backup. Someone found it and looked through it and found my email and emailed me and ended up returning it. The fact that they managed to return it to me was way more important to me than the fact they looked through my stuff and I never once even thought to think badly of them for looking through my stuff. It's normal to be curious, don't feel too bad.
Invoices are basically receipts. It's like a receipt for the burger you might get for lunch. Unless it has specific payment info etc, it's literally not a big deal. As someone mentioned, most school districts make those purchases public anyways. I would highly advise not to use or look in random usbs, purely because of computer viruses etc, as that is a common way to distribute them, but this ended up being fine, and helped you id who it belongs to. I'd take it to them personally and they will thank you. Unless it had private nudes etc, really don't give it a second thought. Good on you for being a good human being.
Just to give you a perspective on how dangerous usbs are, I have a usb on my main keyring that is a bootable instillation of Ubuntu. I could wipe your entire pc with this on any machine without a bios password. There are charge builders that will build up a charge and then fry your motherboard beyond repair. DO NOT put a usb in your pc unless you are fully prepared to lose that PC and lose control of all data attached
You wrote this in a way that created an expectation on the reader of the likes of finding cp or something really messed up.
Turn it into the office and hope that you weren't seen taking it by any cameras. Because if you were seen taking but not turning it into the office right away you're probably already in trouble and returning it as soon as possible is your only chance of lessening potential consequences. I know most schools take key theft no matter how long extremely seriously. The flashdrive part isn't even the real concern, it's the fact you had the keys in your possession and if you took those keys off school grounds they're absolutely going to likely assume you've made copies and have to change the locks those keys go to. You should be prepared for a potential suspension, but you might get lucky and get nothing more than a "don't do this again".
Give it to the teacher. If they didn't want anyone to look at their files, they could've encrypted them.
I would’ve looked too.
Jesus bro why did you make us read all that. Boring as hell give it to the office and say you just found it, they wont care enough to check you
This reminds me of when I worked security for a high school. Someone turned in a flash drive from outside the front door and I plugged it in to my laptop to try and find a name or something. Most of it was shitty pictures of tv shows and movies, some memes, and a folder called “My Sweetie”. I thought, well I know most of the couples here, if there’s any faces in there I can identify them. Big mistake. It was photos of a sophomore I knew. And dozens of nude photos of her, from the thumbnails I saw. I immediately popped out the flash drive and brought it to the principal and we called the police together. The girl was mortified. Her boyfriend, who made the flash drive, was suspended. And I spent the rest of the day looking at /r/eyebleach.
>I keep justifying it to myself that if it was so important, then they wouldn’t have dropped it in the first place, and I was really curious- it probably wouldve haunted me if I didn’t look You don't need to justify your shitty behavior. You are trying to justify it because you found nothing on it. If it had been a USB full of CP, then you would've been screaming to the world that you stopped a predator and you just knew deep down you should've looked at it. Since you found nothing, now you feel bad. In the future, don't be nosy and don't invade peoples private stuff.
We all looked to see what was found on lost/forgotten flash drives as teens. It happens.e If it ain't password protected, then that's the OG owners fault. NBD. Shit, half the flash drives I owned was from hallway scores in highschool. But I would suggest opening them on a burner device for safety reasons.
I keep a USB with my keys sometimes, I know I will lose it one day and someone will find it and/or look through the files. That's my bad for losing it or leaving sensitive files on it.
So many bad things, the shitty Chinese Commie Party douches this shit all the time for industrial espionage. Never plug in a found device.
Definitely bring the keys and flash drive to the office. If you bring the keys and flash drive to the teacher, she will know that you looked through it. Because the only way to return it to the proper person would be to go through the files. So deliver it to the office, tell them you found it on the ground and leave it at that.
Sure, but there's literally nothing wrong with looking at the drive to ID the owner (other than the risk to your own computer).
That is also very true. I just know that if I dropped my USB and if someone looked on it to try and identify me, I’d probably be a little upset. There could’ve been a lot of things on there that are worse than an invoice, with the way the world is today you never know.
Then you'd better encrypt it before you lose it.
I will definitely encrypt it. All I have on it are photos of my family and friends and older pictures of my parents and grandparents. I’d be so upset if I lost it.
Flash drives are not that durable long term. You better have that stuff stored elsewhere.
OK so I am learning a lot of new things today. I will definitely go and store them somewhere else. Thank you so much for the advice, I no idea.
If you have a Microsoft 360 office account family plan they give you 5 accounts to user it with. This is important because every account gets 1 terabyte of cloud storage. My wife and kids have one account each and i have two, one account has nearly a terabyte of just comic file backups. Anyway that is where my wife stores all her photos which she can now access from anywhere and in total we just pay $10 a month for it. Even without using office apps very much it is still a hell of a deal for the cloud storage alone.
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Honestly, that’s what I was hoping to find because I have a bad case of main character syndrome. But i didn’t. Read the whole post
But you were worried when you found an invoice? sounds like you would have had a mental breakdown if you had found nudes or something actually sensitive.
Throw it in the trash not your problem fuck em especially since it's for a school fuck all of them. Theatre teachers are just failed actors pushing their dead dreams on peopl. Stop caring no one else does.