We’re sure you’ve probably seen this in movies and TV shows where the good/bad guy attempts to hack a computer network or system just by plugging in a USB drive. Once the USB drive has been plugged in, the hack seems to run without a hitch and if you’re wondering if that’s just the imagination of movie writers, apparently it is pretty damn real.
Samy Kamkar, a developer, apparently wears such a device around his neck. Called the USBdriveby, it’s basically a USB microcontroller that is small enough to be worn as a necklace. It will connect to computers via USB and is designed to take advantage of the security flaws found in USB ports.
For example the microcontroller is able to trick computers into pretending its a keyboard/mouse, which in turn will send keystrokes to tell monitoring apps like Little Snitch to silence all warnings. It is also able to disable OS X’s built-in firewall, and it can tweak a user’s DNS settings, thus allowing the hacker to replace any website you visit with one of their own, which in turn could facilitate man in the middle attacks.
At the end of the day, it is also able to clean up after itself and closes any windows or settings screens that it might have opened, and imagine all of this can be done in 30-6 seconds that it remains plugged into your computer. Scary stuff, huh? In the meantime if you’re curious you can check out the USBdriveby hack in action in the video above.