"Once the infected thumb drive gets access to one box on the your network, well it's not pretty."

Well, what is being proposed is the taking over of stand alone controller issues in programming flash cells and overriding the firmware software considerations and forcing reads/writes on the flash memory @ the controller .. to obtain or manipulate data.

What you have considered... would have to do with standard high level operating systems interfacing with....ie... FTL(flash translation layer) type matters and infecting a network.

I would say that the high level infectious entry would be less cumbersome.....where directly replacing or overriding code on a stand alone controller/input console would be much more complicated.

Some controllers are application specific ASIC (ROM) and cannot be overwritten if real security issues are needed.... For controllers of importance that utilize within its firmware re-programmable Flash memory...write protects will be in place. Where most controllers for thumb drives are through FTL type interface, the high level OS dictates the controller…

The only issues not write protected will be data storage memory. In that, an AUOTO exe file can be written to any storage memory root directory to be automatically booted to RAM ...for what ever purpose. With that, files should all be controller written to a directory not designated as root, with that, nothing loads to RAM.

Thing is, I can't see some infectious code taking over the read/write duties of a stand alone controller or the redirection of the consol input to the controller..... I can't see the write protects being over ridden.

Anyway .. Enough of this for me.... I’m waiting for an appeal to finalize.

doni