In the beginning of the 2010's I was at a train station with my laptop and a dude walks up to me holding a USB stick. (Or was it an SD card?) Asks me if he can send an email or something. I remember him opening his storage device on my computer and he had some sketchy looking files. Was there a trojan on his USB stick? If there was, had he put them there intentionally? Is this how he scammed people? By approaching them at train stations with some device and an excuse to plug it in? Or was he just an unknowing carrier of the malicious files, a victim to his own habit of plugging his device into random strangers computers?
Perhaps there was nothing there and I was mistaken?
I never found out. But I also haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary with any of my accounts since then. So even if something was up, I think it was not successful.
Your story reminded me of this experience. And also of autorun.inf files on CD-ROMs that would make Windows 95 and later run things. I think at some point in WinXP they disabled auto run of CDs and you had to explicitly choose to run programs that autorun.inf wanted to run.
Only tangentially related to what those GoPro cameras you mention would do with memory cards of course. But a memory nonetheless.
It copied itself into the internal storage, then back to new SD cards.
I wrote out a little text file explaining what had happened and how to remove it.
Never figured out how to tell them about it.