Hello, I was thinking of getting a second-hand PS/2 mouse and keyboard but I’ve heard that a USB mouse and keyboard could carry viruses and infect the PC you are using them on with the virus. Is this true?
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Hi @KalebBennett,
It’s a very interesting question thank you for bringing in this community.
USB devices as a rule, in principle, can carry viruses. But that doesn’t mean that all USB devices are capable of carrying viruses, it just means that if you don’t know where the device came from, then you shouldn’t plug it into your computer even if it doesn’t look like a device that could transmit a virus.
That said, most mice (presumably including this one) don’t contain any writable memory. So the mouse can’t be modified by an infected computer. So if the mouse wasn’t dangerous, to begin with, then plugging it into a dangerous computer generally can’t make it a dangerous mouse.
If you are being too serious about security some particular mouse has some amount of memory in the form of programmable macros, actually stored on-device. This makes the device slightly more suspect – a malicious piece of software could theoretically overwrite your macros. How that might translate into subversive behavior is anyone’s guess, but for run-of-the-mill malware infections, transmission by way of this particular macro function is quite unlikely, if for no other reason than because this mouse is not very common.
Hello @KalebBennett
You can use USB mouse and keyboard without any doubt because this device are not storage device, so both the devices can not contain virus.
hello
of course you can use because they doesn’t contain viruses
