It may look like an innocent cable, but as soon as you connect it to your smartphone, it will hack
(Photo: Gigtime)
Imagine with us for a moment: you are about to board a plane or a train. You have a pretty long trip ahead of you and you want to make sure you have enough energy juice in your smartphone to survive it without going crazy. In front of you is a public charging station with cables of all kinds and species hanging out. How did Haim Hecht ask? what you would you do
If your answer is to connect to the same cable, then this news is exactly for you – because at the security and hacking conference, Defcon, which took place recently in Las Vegas, what looks like a completely innocent USB cable, but made of the same material that your information security nightmares are made of, was revealed.
did you connect Good luck
Image: Hak5
The O.MG Elite is a classic case of “don’t look in the jar”. On the surface, it looks exactly the same as the cable you use every day to charge your devices, but inside it hides some slightly less standard communication components. As soon as you connect the cable to your smartphone, you actually connect these components to electricity and the cable actually opens a hotspot (inside the cable, not on your smartphone). The attacker who is theoretically up to a kilometer away can connect to this hot spot, and from here the cable is able to send information and receive commands.
This is what awaits inside. Image: Hak5
Among other things, the cable is able to track everything you type (Keylogger); run commands to download malicious spyware to your device that will continue to work even after you disconnect it; activate your device remotely; steal your passwords directly from Chrome; And more sweets that will turn your phone into a tool in the hands of the “bad guys”. If that’s not enough, it has Geofencing settings, so hackers can define in which physical areas the cable will work and in which it won’t, and you can even set it to destroy its data in case the victim leaves the range of your connection to it. The perfect crime.
The O.MG Cable is available in any standard configuration: from USB-C to USB-A and also Lightning so that it can impersonate more or less any cable you have in your drawer, or waiting for you at the public charging points in shopping malls, airports and other places. If that’s not enough, it’s even effective if you connect it to a Windows computer or Mac, so more or less no device is really safe from it.
Costs much less than your smartphone
The scariest thing about the new O.MG Cable is its price, which is $179.99 on the official website. While this is not a price that will compete with the cable you purchased from Express Owners, it does mean that if someone wants to, they no longer have to own Stark Industries to hack into other victims. So it is true that it is likely that this wayward cable in the shopping mall is probably really innocent and not just in appearance, but still – as a security researcher once told us? Connecting to a USB cable you don’t know is like brushing your teeth with someone else’s brush. You’ll probably be fine, but better not.
Idan Ben Tovim
Born with a joystick in his hand. He has far too many gadgets and far too little free time to play with them all. Has an unexplained hammer for performing instrument battery calibrations. When he’s not busy writing about technology, he likes to talk about it, and a lot
