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Security researchers detail 'unpatchable' USB hack
Remember Karsten Nohl? The security researcher who discovered how to infect just about any USB device with scarily savvy malware and delivered a lengthy talk about it at this year's Black Hat conference? At the time he didn't want to share the code for his exploit, but fellow researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson figured out how to pull off some of the same tricks and they've published their findings on GitHub. Why? To try and force device manufacturers to get their security acts together.
New malware can live inside any USB device undetected
It turns out that the stalwart USB thumbstick, or any universal serial bus device, isn't as trustworthy as once thought. A pair of security researchers has found we need to worry about more than just malware-infected files that are stored portable drives, and now need to guard against hacks built into our geek-stick's firmware according to Wired. The proof-of-concept malware Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell have created is invisible and installable on a USB device and can do everything from taking over a user's PC to hijacking the DNS settings for your browser. Or, if it's installed on a mobile device it can spy on your communications and send them to a remote location, similar to the NSA's Cottonmouth gadgets. If those don't worry you, perhaps that the "BadUSB" malware can infect any USB device -- including keyboards -- and wreak havoc, will. What's more, a simple reformat isn't enough to disinfect either, and the solution that Lell and Nohl suggest goes against the core of what many of us are used to doing.
