There was a story -- possibly an urban legend going around.. 

Persons deliberately "lose" usb sticks around various places, shopping malls / car parks / stations etc .. 

On those sticks is some sort of naughty trojan/mallware that installs to your computer when you plug it in to see what's on there.

Be careful out there :) 

nononono it's a list of names and accounts of clients from HSBC/UBS/CS/GSHC... sell it to a government and retire happily

That's not an urban legend.  It's a well-known attack, often aimed against a specific corporate entity (in this case, the USB stick is dropped in strategic spots nearby such as the entrance or the parking lot).

THIS on the other hand has all the elements of an urban legend. Only one case reported on "boingboing.net" quoting some obscure Dutch publication with absolutely no details provided, please.

Whats an urban leg end? Is it a foot thats been dropped by a Dexter type?

For starters the Elsevier, reporting this particular incident, is the Dutch equivalent to the German Spiegel and is not an obscure publication at all.

I know a number of firms that execute this type of attack as part of a security audit.

But don't take my word, Bruce Scheiner has a couple of things to say on the subject as well

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/06/yet_another_peo.html

God .. I hope Alice and Bob's shared secret doesn't get out   :)

Hah, this conversation is getting out of hands :D

I´ll just take it to the lost & found office, maybe someone misses it so much that they check from there too?

I don't think anyone will show up unless there's something important stored on it.

You could have a look at its contents on a Linux machine and report here if you find any trojan  ;)

I don´t think no one shows up too but at least I´ve done the days good deed :) And I get rid of it too.

And yes, I have to admit that I did check if there is something "important" or any clues to who it belongs, virus scanned it first. No virus, trojan and it didn´t have any secret information of how to get rich fast. Only lot of pictures...

No I wonder, that did I brake some laws when opening it? :D

Post the pics!

Please don't; it's private data.  Even if the owner posted them on Facebook, it's noone else's business.

If there is nothing inside that could identify the owner, you can bring the USB stick to the Service cantonal des objets trouvés:

Of course I wont post the pictures. I didn´t even bother to go through them, there were so many. And I would never ever get a clue of the owner from the pictures anyway so I let them be...

Thanks for the information OmegaMan! Good to know!

Is it a USB stick or hard disk? Somebody stole black seagate external hard disk from my bag last week.

Just a normal USB stick, sorry...