Nowadays it’s hard to trust whatever piece of tech you’re holding, even if you’ve been using it the whole time. Your USB is plagued by shortcut viruses, your memory card bricks your smartphone whenever you try playing a song saved in it, and the ATM machine that you frequently visit harvests security PINs from people who use it using an external keypad device.
Now, that’s just the icing for the cake. You’ve never seen laptops being snuffed out of its life essence, or PCs being “zombified”, nuh-uh. Here are three pieces of malicious tech that’s out to get your stuff.
The Thieving Charging Kiosk
“He read the sign, didn’t he? Wait, no?” krebsonsecurity.com
We all know carrying a dying smartphone or laptop SUCKS. No games to play, no people to chat or text with, no nada. So anyone, ANYONE, will be desperate enough to find somewhere or something that can keep them up and running. And when I say desperate, I mean “Holy crap where the hell’s the charging station I’m at 1 bar and my phone’s gonna die, dammit!” type of desperate. Luckily, charging kiosks are available at your local 7-11 for a fee or as a free service at your nearby airport lounge. Unluckily for you, these charging kiosks may be rigged to hijack your device and harvest your personal information. That’s your social security number, your ATM PIN, or your Ashley Madison account details.
The process is called “juice-jacking”, where a charging kiosk, once a device is plugged in and detected, will siphon off your phone or laptop’s data, or plant a malware on it as the phone is being “juiced”, depending on the given payload. Now, you may say that it isn’t that scary if you don’t really plug into it. However, you probably forgot how other people are “desperate” for a charged device. One experiment on a black hat convention discovered that more than three hundred people plugged into a charging kiosk despite a sign saying that you shouldn’t trust such charging stations. If you used one such station, you shouldn’t be surprised if your credit card information shows zero on its remaining balance.
Smartphone Camera Spying Apps
Let’s face it: relationships may have some sort of infidelity laced on it, and you’re worried about your significant other cheating on you. Don’t fret, though, because there are smartphone apps that will allow you to spy on your sweetheart to see what he or she’s doing while the phone’s up and running. What you don’t know though is that it cuts both ways; you may be allowed access to your SO’s camera, but that doesn’t mean other people won’t be.
Surprisingly, people don’t seem to care about how dangerous these apps are, or at least whatever the repercussions of using it to them, because these apps not only spy on someone using a smartphone’s camera, it can also log keystrokes, log calls, and even get a complete data dump of your phonebook. So long as it achieves the purpose of giving you some peace of mind regarding your relationship, a little blackmail material such as your “private time” videos or a list of your flings or your common search terms are small prices to pay.
“P-O-R-N-H-U-B…” scientificamerican.com
The Make-Your-PC-Asplode USB
Okay, here’s the thing. Some of us totally can’t live without or handy dandy USB flash drives. These sticks of life are considered the modern version of sneakerware, allowing you to send that report on time right before the boss even steps his right foot into the boardroom. Just slap it into your workstation, copy the files, and then BOOM! Wait, what the hell just happened? Your PC is a smoking mess, the smell of acrid, burning electrical wiring wafts through your nose, and your report’s totally NOT gonna make it to the board meeting. You’re screwed! So what happened?
This six-pack’s gonna e-wallop that workstation into scrap metal! grahamcluley.com
Turns out the USB you’re using has a payload of two-hundred twenty volts of electricity (technically that’s minus two-hundred twenty), turning your workstation into a massive, smoking, stove-sized brick. A Russian security guy named “Dark Purple” created such a flashstick that will allow anyone with evil intent (i.e. your jealous officemate living on the adjacent cubicle) to fry some unsuspecting poor soul’s computer in a similar fashion as plugging a 110v appliance to a 220v socket. And no, it’s not limited to computers; the guy says that it can incapacitate anything that has a USB drive interface on it (want to see it in action? Here you go). The good news is that it only fries the hardware connected to your USB interface, which means your motherboard. The bad news is that this is the second version, and the third version might as well fry EVERYTHING on that computer. That’s your report screwed, your workstation a burning mess, and you getting fired. What could get worse?
