Posted on 10/10/2016 11:56:27 PM PDT by Swordmaker
There’s a device out there called USB Kill 2.0 (or USB Killer and other variants) that can fry an electronic device with a USB port. While it looks like an every day USB flash drive, rather than memory, these devices have capacitors that can store up juice being transmitted over the USB bus and then discharge at once. The result is a high-voltage attack on your PC, Mac, smartphone, or other device that can fry the electronics.
YouTuber EverythingApplePro posted a demonstration video with one of these devices where he fried a PC and tried to fry an iPhone 7 Plus and a Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Yes, that’s the same Galaxy Note 7 that has been exploding in the wild, making EverythingApplePro a brave lad.
The short version is that this device appeared to fry the Lightning circuitry on an iPhone 7 Plus, but that device appears to have surge protection preventing broader damage. The Galaxy Note 7 didn’t appear to suffer any damage. The PC demonstrated on early in the video was fried lickety-split.
The interesting thing is that this is the kind of device you might see in a movie and shake your head because that’s now how things works. You can walk up to a PC, stick in a thumb drive, and destory it. Right?
But the principle here is sound: capacitors store up juice from the USB port and discharge it all at once. High voltage death then rains down on your device. It’s scary, and I’m glad that iPhones and the soon-to-be-extinct Note 7 are both protected.
Inside the USB Kill 2.0 – those circuits are capacitors
TheHackerNews reported in August that recent MacBook models are designed to protect against this kind of attack. Apple optically isolated the USB ports. My educated guess is that such protections will become de rigueur sooner, rather than later. But until then, one of these £49.95 (US$55.80) devices allows any miscreant or ne’er-do-well to wreck your day.
So be careful.
Pinging dayglored, ThunderSleeps, and Shadow Ace for their lists as this effects all platforms that use a USB bus.
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Optical isolation makes a lot of sense. Should have been part of the original spec.
perhaps a silly question, but could this be used to remove personal data from devices that are to be discarded?
I cannot get video working on my computer...
It might effect devices with Solid State Drives. . . but not anything with a hard drive. This works by frying the motherboard or logic board. It may not even reach the data on a Solid State Drive. . . so I wouldn't put any faith in data destruction by its use.
That’s because even just the picture of it on your computer it will fry it, I expect my computer to fry later :^)
Sooo I need a big magnet or a big hammer ;)
LOL
This is why I buy all my usb drives in back alleyways.
So if you want to wipe your hard drive, it's still better to go with like a cloth or something?
Not in most circumstances. This only fries the circuitry, not the data storage.
Sooo I need a big magnet...
Why was this created? Malicious. Maybe it beats hitting the device with a hammer though.
Some data storage devices are relatively immune to magnetic fields. Modern hard drives can still have data recovered after being passed through a bulk eraser. The only way to make sure the data cannot be recovered is to have the data storage device physically destroyed.
“Because I can” is probably the major reason. Though if nothing else, it is going to force the industry to follow Apple and isolate the USB ports. They’ve kept increasing the power on USB ports but there’s no protection on them. It’s not unheard of for misbehaving USB devices to kill ports or vice versa. It’s a bad spec in that regard. Something had to be done but nobody but Apple has been doing anything about it because it ‘wasn’t a real problem.’
Oh crap! I guess I’ll just go back to the Commodore 64 and be free of all this nonsense.
JK (:>
No, silly. It will just wreck the first DC-blocking capacitors on your motherboard and other USB devices in concurrent attachment o the same circuit, not the hard drives or removeable media that are storing yur data. Just remove them and reinstall them in another computer, and most ofthe data will be available, AFIK.
It does, because although each of the board's DC-blocking passive capacitors actually isolate every active transistor device circuit, when a capacitor fails from high-voltage overload it fails short, and can then pass the DC voltage it is supposed to block into the diode or transistor, killing its junction; whereas an optically isolated circuit fails open and cannot pass DC (or signal, either), thus preseves the devices it is protecting from stray DC surges. But optical AC signal transmission is far more expensive to achieve than capacitive DC blocking, so no economically prudent manufacturer will have more than a few such optically isolated interfaces.
Anything of higher voltage or current operation will be protected by a fusible link, not an optical, capacitive, or diode-linked fail-safe element. BTW, the brown rectangular devices on the USB bed are MLCs--multilayer ceramic capacitors. These capacitors are made of essentially barium titanate insulator material which has a very high dielectric constant, making them able to store a thousand or more times the charge that an air gap would provide.
But the area is so small that a lot of internal plates are needed to store very much charge, and the gap between the internal plates is therefore so tiny, that very high voltages between the plates cannot be tolerated, else the dielectric material isolating the plates will fail and the capacitor will short out.
The devices you see pictured are commonly used in circuits that only operate at a few volts. These capacitors cannot store enough charge to be very destructive, so they are much less dangerous than, say, an electrolytic capacitor designed for 250 volts and 2,000 microfarads (for a camera flash), which can knock you on your fanny, and when held in one hand with the charged lead touch by the other hand, might give enough of a jolt to stop your heart as the current passes from one hand to the other across your chest.
The capacitive USB circuit you see is not likely to store that kind of energy.
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