In the early 2000s, US Air Force pilots in Afghanistan routinely used USB drives purchased from local vendors — sometimes in cities like Kabul — interchangeably across both classified and unclassified systems when planning missions, creating serious security vulnerabilities. Junior IT security staff who raised concerns were largely ignored by senior officers who didn't fully understand the risks of transferring malware between systems via removable media. This practice had serious consequences, as adversaries began planting infected USB drives with local vendors, ultimately contributing to the 2008 Agent.BTZ malware infection of the Department of Defense, which took 14 months to eradicate.
