Gonna have to figure out a way to lock down USB ports but still find a way to allow people to use them.
I will admit, with the prevalence of network shares, I haven’t used a USB drive in the heat of a struggle for years.
This hack has been known for years.
All USB devices have a micro-controller (CPU) and you can hack the code that it runs.
Typically a USB thumb drive has a 100mhz ARM processor running it. When you plug one into your PC you are plugging a small computer into your big computer and trusting that the ARM in the thumb drive has not been tampered with.
It’s quite easy to modify a thumb drive to do all sorts of stuff. You can stick in a tiny SM oscillator and key it on/off with an ARM I/O pin and send data to a remote receiver nearby....this is one of the easier hacks.
You can reprogram the ARM to make a 64GB thumb drive look like a 32GB drive and save data on the hidden 32GB that the user cannot erase.
SATA hard drives also have a controller on board that can be tampered with.
I’m wondering what it is of mine that they will find so interesting that they would want to hack it,
This sounds like a marketing response to security issues in the cloud.
THIS GUY.