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Hacking USB Firmware

Posted by timothy on 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.)

2 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. back in my day... by Anonymous Coward · · 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 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Back in my day we used to cut another write enable notch on the opposite side of floppy disks so we could write data on both sides.