Users Really Do Plug in USB Drives They Find [pdf]

Very interesting. I actually built a "thumb drive inspector" out of one of the ST Micro butterfly boards, basically its USB OTG port can act as a host and look at the contents of a file, and if it turns out to be a suicide drive or a drive waiting to exploit you can see that too (at the risk of losing your $19 board.

From a security perspective I would expect places with high security requirements would leave drives around on purpose to find people unable to resist the temptation.

Even knowing better now, it's still tempting. In most cases, throwing it in a isolated linux system should be okay.

Of course, unless it's one of those USB-Killer devices that pushes voltage back... Curiosity is fun and dangerous at the same time