Slashdot Mirror
Student Used 'USB Killer' Device To Destroy $58,000 Worth of College Computers (theverge.com)
A former student of The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, has pled guilty to charges that he destroyed tens of thousands of dollars worth of campus computers using a USB device designed to instantly overwhelm and fry their circuitry. The plea was announced today by the Department of Justice, FBI, and Albany Police Department. The Verge reports: Vishwanath Akuthota, the former student, now faces up to 10 years in prison (with up to three years of supervision after release) and a fine totaling up to $250,000. He was arrested and taken into custody in North Carolina on February 22nd, just over a week after he went on a spree of inserting the "USB Killer" device into 66 of Saint Rose's computers around various locations on campus. Such devices can be easily and freely purchased online and can overload the surge protection in many PCs.
Akuthota, 27, apparently made video recordings of himself inserting the malicious USB device into the computers and said "I'm going to kill this guy" as the PCs were overloaded and permanently ruined. So it's fair to say the FBI and APD had all the evidence they needed. In total, Akuthota caused $58,471 worth of damage. As part of his guilty plea, he has agreed to pay back that amount to the college, a small private school in New York's capital city. The Verge reached out to The College of Saint Rose for a statement on today's news, but a spokesperson said the college had been asked by law enforcement to refrain from commenting.
Akuthota, 27, apparently made video recordings of himself inserting the malicious USB device into the computers and said "I'm going to kill this guy" as the PCs were overloaded and permanently ruined. So it's fair to say the FBI and APD had all the evidence they needed. In total, Akuthota caused $58,471 worth of damage. As part of his guilty plea, he has agreed to pay back that amount to the college, a small private school in New York's capital city. The Verge reached out to The College of Saint Rose for a statement on today's news, but a spokesperson said the college had been asked by law enforcement to refrain from commenting.
If you're going to do something stupid or better yet illegal, don't record yourself.
Here's a fun Q&A with him on FB: https://www.facebook.com/saint...
Sounds like he got fired and was looking for revenge! Curious what he did to deserve the firing.
And shows how fucked up the US "justice" system is. Average sentence for murder is something like seven years. He should be given a psych evaluation and made to pay restitution via wage garnishment in the future.
It's self explanatory, he did it because hes stupid.. They didn't need to mention it. We all got it.
For a lot of the people doing stuff like this, if they can't brag about the crime, there's no point doing it. It's not really anarchy or revenge that they seek. They're attention whores. They thrive on the publicity and praise/criticism they get. For them, pulling a stunt like this without recording it (and distributing the recording) is like the proverbial tree that falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear. In their minds, it's indistinguishable from the tree never falling / them never having committed the crime.
A fuse would not protect from this sort of over voltage damage. Fuses are slow and by the time sufficient current is flowing to blow the fuse - the circuitry is already shot. Electronic fuses (MOSFETS with controllers) are much faster and do not need to be replaced. Most devices use current limited load switches to limit surge current and prevent damage. But even these devices, while better then fuses, would not help. ESD protection diodes would help but they are not designed for large amounts of energy and will quickly burn up. With the amount of energy this guy was adding, the diodes will literally pop off the PCB. USB is quite well protected (now, not originally) but all consumer electronics will break when you have hundreds of volts applied. Well, ethernet would at least prevent the damage from cascading into the device - but few interfaces are protected like ethernet.
Wow! He destroyed one Mac!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
these USB killers do way more than a hundred volts. IIRC it was in the thousands and it usually hits them multiple times before you can yank the usb, cycling about once a second. Though there is no amperage behind it the volts come in so quickly that I doubt even ESD protection could block it. When this was demoed it killed even protected computers because it slams it 3-4 times before the person can react and yank it out of the slot.
For once, an MBA has to actually pay for the damage himself.
So, that means 4 Macbooks?
He didn't get 10 years.
The article, like most, quotes the maximum anyone could ever get for violating a particular statute. Rarely does anyone get the maximum. The judge takes into account exactly what the person did, their record, etc. In most cases, the penalty is actually negotiated with the defendant via their attorney.
The crime he was charged with would be something like "intentionally destroying property greater than $10,000". That covers taking a baseball bat to your ex-boyfriend's car, destroying the school computers, intentionally driving a bulldozer through someone's house, and lots of other ways of destroying lots of things. The WORST possible cases of "intentionally destroying property valued *over* $10,000" could get 10 years, if the defendant told the judge "fuck you, I'll do it again when I get out".
You can reduce the judge's descretion by enacting a specific law against "destroying a schools computers" and another law against "destroying your neighbor's car" ans another against "destroying the judge's house", but I think we have enough laws already.
> Diodes are cheap.
As is the empty space in a car lock. Filling the ignitio with epoxy makes the car useless. Blowing the USB ports on a school computer makes the keyboard, mouse, printer, or other devices useless.
Many years ago I worked for a technical institute. Got an urgent call "the computers where exploding"
Some little turd of an individual had switched all the machines off then set the power supplies to 110v (in a 220v country)
So the next person to turn the machine on got a loud bang and smoke...
Many machines where destroyed. Many courses had to be cancelled.
People like this need locked up, forever.
I have to admit, I laughed pretty hard the first time I saw the picture of the etherkiller. (Several people have made similar cables, usually much less hacky looking, e.g. with matching colored cables.)
I always wondered if some poor bastard ever unwittingly plugged in one of these things that some malicious person left lying around and if so, what happened (and if anyone was ever charged.)
I fail to understand why this is newsworthy. Next we will see an article about how you can buy hammers nearly anywhere and they can be used to do massive damage to cars, PCs, laptops, monitors, cell phones with no training at all!
Straight from the website: "When the device is charged, -200VDC is discharged over the data lines of the host device. This charge/discharge cycle is repeated many times per second, until the USB Killer is removed." So not thousands. And it does have A LOT of amperage behind it. That's why it works. It can surge a large amount of amperage for a very brief time, which can cook any hotspot in a silicon device once it's broken down (which it will do because nobody is putting 200V process silicon parts in high speed USB devices).
USB protection is designed to prevent against reasonable faults (a device drawing too much power, minor overvoltages, ESD strikes). This is not a reasonable fault. Additionally, it surges the data lines, which are more sensitive. They have to be more sensitive because they are high speed lines that have signal integrity constraints. You can't just start adding protection to them willy nilly without affecting that.
Their cover story is "The USB Killer is a CE Approved and FCC Approved testing device designed to test the surge protection circuitry of electronics to their limits - and beyond." which we all know is B.S. And It's probably not likely people will start designing their USB hardware to survive this unless people don't quit acting like dicks.