[Dailydave] USB Drives that think they're CDROMs

[Robert Wesley McGrew]

I recall a couple of messages posted here a while back about using USB
drives that pretend to be CDROMs for their ability to autorun whatever
nasty code you'd like to throw on there.

Yesterday I picked up a SanDisk Cruzer Micro 512MB drive with "U3
Smart" functionality.  U3 is a platform for developing applications
that can run "cleanly" from a USB drive.  The way it's implemented, at
least on this Cruzer, is that it pretends to be two drives at once:
the large main drive, and a small 6 meg USB CDROM drive.  This allows
it to write-protect the U3 software and autorun it whenever you stick
it into a windows machine (kind of annoying).  After tinkering with it
for a while, I've figured out a way to convince the update utility to
write an arbitrary small ISO to to the normally unchangeable CDROM:

http://cse.msstate.edu/~rwm8/hackingU3/

Something similar is probably possible with other U3 drives.  Pretty
handy if you're looking to do this sort of iPod-ish-jacking/snarfing
thing on the small and cheap.  Or even if you just want to replace U3
with something more useful.

-- 
Robert Wesley McGrew
http://cse.msstate.edu/~rwm8/