2016 has been, among other things, the year of the hacker. The DNC can’t keep control of its emails, Mark Zuckerberg got publicly humiliated by a pack of nerds, and not even the SATs are safe. But one thing we haven’t seen is some good old-fashioned ’80s style destruction of computers, complete with sparks and smoke. And now we might, with the USB Kill 2.0 on sale.
What, you might ask, is the USB Kill 2.0? Why, it’s a simple little device that plugs into any USB port! It draws power rapidly, filling its capacitors, and then dumps all that electricity right back into the device it’s plugged into. If that device is hardened against power surges or otherwise protected against huge electrical blasts, you’ll be fine. Unfortunately, most of the stuff around us with a USB port is not hardened.
If you’re wondering why anybody would engineer something that takes trolling to new heights, first of all, in many places, there really shouldn’t be a visible, unprotected USB port in the first place. Even if it’s just a copier or a photo booth, nothing is stopping far nastier people from, say, uploading malware that can be dumped on any other flash drive people slot in, or perhaps go into the operating system and swipe your credit cards. Secondly, if your job is to destroy electronic devices that contain sensitive information and make sure they can’t be brought back from the dead, this is a much cheaper and more effective way of doing it rather than shipping it to India. You can also buy an optional safety shield, making this a quick, useful way to test whether a device is vulnerable to this kind of attack in the first place.
We’re sure, of course, that it’s those in the latter group that have crashed USBKill.com‘s servers, and not people who plan to jam this thing into every briefly abandoned laptop at Starbucks. Surely that’s the case. But, um, maybe keep an eye on your laptop, just in case.
(via ZDNet)