Beware Of Keystroke Loggers Disguised As USB Phone Chargers, FBI Warns (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader cites an article on Ars Technica: FBI officials are warning private industry partners to be on the lookout for highly stealthy keystroke loggers that surreptitiously sniff passwords and other input typed into wireless keyboards. The FBI's Private Industry Notification (PDF) comes more than 15 months after whitehat hacker Samy Kamkar released a KeySweeper, a proof-of-concept attack platform that covertly logged and decrypted keystrokes from many Microsoft-branded wireless keyboards and transmitted the data over cellular networks. To lower the chances that the sniffing device might be discovered by a target, Kamkar designed it to look almost identical to USB phone chargers that are nearly ubiquitous in homes and offices."If placed strategically in an office or other location where individuals might use wireless devices, a malicious cyber actor could potentially harvest personally identifiable information, intellectual property, trade secrets, passwords, or other sensitive information," FBI officials wrote in last month's advisory. "Since the data is intercepted prior to reaching the CPU, security managers may not have insight into how sensitive information is being stolen."

Comments

Re:Use a USB Condom

[Rei]

There might come a day. ;)

A friend of mine was joking the other day about his coffee machine. It's always warm, even when it's not on, and far larger than is needed to make coffee, which he finds suspicious - maybe it's actually a clever ploy to mine bitcoin on stolen electricity, he suggested. The more I think about it, the more I think that's genius, a perfect scheme for a nefarious manufacturer in China ;) The cost of a sim card dongle won't add much to the cost of the mining hardware the cost of the electricity is over half the total cost of mining, and people would actually pay to acquire the hardware and host it in their own climate-controlled "data center" (home). They could make them, then sell them on ebay for cut-rate prices. So long as it actually makes coffee and doesn't break in that regard, I really doubt many people would notice. And of those who noticed, who would think to break it open to see if there's any bitcoin-mining hardware inside, rather than just defective wiring?