Hacking USB Firmware

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 2, 2014 @10:07AM from the fun-profit-what's-the-difference dept.

An anonymous reader writes Now the NSA isn't the only one who can hack your USB firmware: "In a talk at the Derbycon hacker conference in Louisville, Kentucky last week, researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson showed that they've reverse engineered the same USB firmware as Nohl's SR Labs, reproducing some of Nohl's BadUSB tricks. And unlike Nohl, the hacker pair has also published the code for those attacks on Github, raising the stakes for USB makers to either fix the problem or leave hundreds of millions of users vulnerable." Personally, I always thought it was insane that USB drives don't come with physical write-protect switches to keep them from being infected by malware. (More on BadUSB here.)

4 of 97 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

back in my day... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-02 10:12 · Score: 5, Funny

we used black tape over the write protect notch on our floppy disks and we LIKED IT THAT WAY
1. Re:back in my day... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-02 10:53 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  How would that work? Unless you removed the metal cover that protects the disk.
2. Re:back in my day... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · 2014-10-02 12:22 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  You need a bigger tool - once you go big black eight inches, you never go back.
  
  --
  Ezekiel 23:20
Re:Signed Firmware by jafac · 2014-10-02 11:44 · Score: 3, Funny

Well, back in my day, you used to have to expose the IC to a UV light to get it to clear the registers so you could even install a new firmware. These young kids with their newfangled firmware flash images! (get off my lawn)

--

These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.