(Image: USBKill)
Posted on 03/18/2017 6:54:27 PM PDT by Swordmaker
When plugged in, this weaponized USB stick can destroy laptops, kiosks, ATMs, cars, and more.
Remember that USB stick that would destroy almost anything in its path, from laptops, photo booths, kiosks, to even cars?
Now there's a new version, and it's even more dangerous than before.
In case you missed it the first time around, a Hong Kong-based company built a weaponized pocket-sized USB stick, which when plugged into a device, will rapidly charge its capacitors from the USB power supply and then discharge, frying the affected device's circuits.
Dubbed the USB Kill stick, it fries almost any device with a USB port, though modern Apple hardware is apparently not affected.
The makers of the USB Kill stick have created a more powerful version with a higher voltage and amp output and a three-times faster pulse rate of up to 12 times a second.
(Excerpt) Read more at zdnet.com ...
Only solid state drives. . . it won't touch drives that have data stored on magnetic media, but it will destroy their electronics. Unfortunately, you can replace the electronics and still read the data.
Essentially any modern Mac is protected. Some good quality PCs as well. Depends on the design of the USB port whether the port will survive or not. On a Mac it will, IIRC. As for data and everything, it depends on how the data is stored.
Fail
Ive been in computer electronics repair since 1980
Five years is a bench Tech component level repair and troubleshooting Raytheon Data Systems military grade systems
Five years of large system repairs in the field
Five years years tech support manager for PC service company
10 years of management of International telecommunications backbones
10 years of Data Network design
And now working as a network security engineer
Do you know what USB stands for? Do you know that even the difference between a choke coil and a Pico fuse in basic Electronics?...... do you know what even “bad boys rape our young girls with Violet gives willingly” stands for?
Do you know the difference balanced and unbalanced ?..an unshielded twisted pair and shielded twisted pair and why the pair is Twisted in the first place... or why the shield has a drain on it? Or why you never leave and unterminated cable plugged in? .. or what a ground Loop is?.. why sometimes a T1 circuit won’t work if the cables too short?
Come on tell me your background so you can offer an intelligent opinion
I’m going to guess ive epaired more circuit boards with an oscilloscope, logic diagrams and a soldering iron in a week then you’ve ever seen in your life
Do you know what the 7 Layers is it’s not a burrito
No, not a sure kill for a hard drive. Might fry the mother oars and leave the peripherals alone. The disk would still have the magnetic patterns on it.
You no understand capacitors. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor
You no understand voltage conversion. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor
You no understand Amps. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere
You not so smart with electronics.
Back in the 60’s we had a lightening strike in our back yard. It blew out all the electrics in the house, and they were smoking.
The black, dial AT&T phone worked perfectly; we used it to call for help.
oh and you not so smart about transformers. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer
I can get a million volts from a 9v battery. Amperage is just going to be minuscule.
Think about it like this. You have a bathroom with a floor drain. It is fully capable of keeping that bathroom from getting flooded with all the taps running. The USB stick is a rubber membrane and you hook it up to a tap. It gets full and bursts. Flooded bathroom and 3/4th of the rest of your house. Water is an easy way to think about electron flow, be it push or navy pull.
Are you saying Hillary’s ordered a few dozen?
Several years ago, a squirrel shorted the high tension lines to the low voltage lines on the power pole behind my over 90 year old mom's house. The resulting power surge took out over $6,000 of her electronics including her big screen TV, her Satellite TV box with its recorder, the big screen TV in her bedroom, her laser printer, a microwave oven, her wireless phone base stations, a plug-in wall clock, the cable modem, her clock radio/alarm clock, her stereo, her refrigerator, the freezer in the garage, the clothes washer (the 220 volt dryer took the surge OK), and several fluorescent fixtures that were turned on. . . as well as fried some of the circuit breakers. Her Apple iMac was on, and kept on working through the whole thing! Didn't even flicker. It just lost connection to the internet when the modem was fried.
Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) ruled it, and I quote, "an act of God, by squirrel."
I kid you not. . . and refused to pay for any of the damages, even though there was negligence in how close their high tension lines were placed to their low voltage 120 v. lines that allowed the squirrel to bridge between them.
But her iMac kept on ticking. . . on the other hend, her college student caregiver's PC laptop, which unfortunately was plugged, in was cooked.
PG&E wouldn't pay, but her homeowner's insurance covered all of it with replacement value coverage. Damn, I wish the iMac had been zapped too. Could a got a brand new, up-to-date iMac for her.
I think I said that. . . but there are a lot of "cheap PC motherboards" out there that these can zap. There was a lot of questions when this first came up last year about how much damage they could do the SSDs, and no one really knew a definitive answer. SSDs are not like the platters on a magnetic drive. My viewpoint is that probably the devastating damage to the motherboard would probably limit the damage that could be done to the solid state drives before it ever got that far and most likely the data would be preserved. The motherboard would be toast before any surges got through that would effect the peripherals attached to it. i.e. the frying of the motherboard would act as a sort of fuse protecting the rest, if the USB circuitry didn't do it first. At some point the traces on the boards might even give out, if the amperage and voltage were high enough, stopping the damage from going further.
The question then becomes one of economics: is it more economical to repair the computer or just replace it and restore the data from a backup? (You do have one, right? That question is part of the economic considerations.)
I've no idea. But I was thinking this could be a way to destroy a hard drive without having to erase and rewrite over it multiple times. Many people have responded to say that it won't erase the hard drive; I appreciate everyone who answered my question!
Now that's funny. . . thinking about repairing one will give you gas, either way.
Yep, I know someone who has one of those bought from China.
When he gets stuff under warranty that they refuse to take back he uses that to fry the TV, Tablet, or whatever.
Best used in USB port when the item you want to fry is turned off.
They sell them as test devises.
The best way to destroy the data on platter drive storage is to hit them with a heavy duty oscillating magnetic field which rapidly changes poles, then open the case, bend the platters completely out of true flatness, scratch the surfaces as much as possible (both sides). then dump the whole set of platters in fuel oil. . . that dissolves the magnetic substrate which holds the data and strips it from the aluminum platters. . . if you really want to be certain. Burn the fuel oil with the hard drives still in it. I guarantee even the CIA will not be able to retrieve anything from the remnants of the mess that is usable. Of course, they won't need to. They'll probably already have a copy of everything on your drives. . . with back ups at the NSA.
No, the data would still be intact on the platters, if it's a mechanical drive with spinning discs.
It seems that this is designed to physically damage the electronics on the system board, so it's quite possible that it may not damage data on an SSD (solid state drive) either.
If you want to make the data on a hard drive unrecoverable, you need to know that there are different levels of "reliability." If you simply want to clear the data from your hard drive before selling or disposing of the computer, there are a couple of free utilities for (relatively) securely deleting all the data on your disk.
There's "Active@ KillDisk" - http://lsoft.net/killdisk.aspx - or "Disk Wipe" - http://www.diskwipe.org/.
Both of these are probably more than secure enough for personal or business needs. However it's believed that given enough time, effort, and resources, the data may be at least partially recovered (we're talking about government agencies attempting the recovery, not a "hacker.")
The only truly secure way to ensure that the data cannot be recovered is to physically destroy the disk platters of the drive. For instance, when I'd replace a hard drive that contained confidential data, after I removed the hard drive, it was handed over to a government employee who took it to an industrial metal shredder. When a hard drive has been reduced to a bunch of 1/2" shards, your data has been securely deleted.
Mark
As a long time IT person, and one who once mistook the power supply cable for a MultiTech Stat-MUX for a keyboard cable (both used the old, large 5 pin DIN plugs,) I can assure you that plugging just 18 volts DC into a computer's keyboard connector port designed for 5 volts DC, is more than enough to fry the circuit boards, effectively destroying the device.
Mark
Thanks !! Stay Safe !
"Test everything! The USB Killer adaptor kit allows you to test against Lightning, USB-C & MicroUSB devices.
These are no ordinary adaptors: Engineered to bypass all authentication checks, these adaptors are tested working against previously protected devices.
Lightning devices, such as the iPhone 5, 6 & 7 have been notoriously difficult to test, as each Lightning cable contains a special authentication chip.
We developed a Lightning adaptor that bypasses the authentication checks, and can immediately deliver an USB Surge attack to any lightning device!
USB-C devices can also use authentication, but with the USBKill.com USB-C adaptor, you can test against a large variety of devices."
https://www.usbkill.com/usb-killer/10-usb-kill-adaptor-kit.html
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