Would a magnet work?

Would a magnet work?

For any of this to happen the controller OpRoms would first have to be flashed with malicious firmware......

This USB exploit is offering milions of ways for implementing some kind of spyware/malware into Firmware/BIOS of almost any kind of USB devices (and any other non-USB programmable controlers) with some kind of storage kontroller inside. Now just think a little that almost all of devices and chips of this type are manufactured or assembled in China. Are they (China's government/secret services) going to abuse this exploit to spread some kind of spyware via USB flash-drives, external USB HDD's, controller chips/devices.... Noooo, sure they wouldn't 😇 I think this exploit exists for God knows how many years. No one knows exactly how many USB storage and similar devices are silently infected with some kind of spyware crap. With releasing this in public SR Labs just released the beast and now every government with IT factories on their ground is going to think about abusing this exploit for... imagination is your only limit. Now to put back on my tin foil hat... 🙂

What's stopping the USB FW from being read\scanned when it's inserted in a port?

Before you start panicking and throwing away your peripherals, there are a few caveats to the research. 1. Not every USB chip Firstly, this attack will not work on all USB chips automatically – it appears to be vendor specific, and while there are a limited number of USB silicon suppliers, there's still a lot of chip models to tackle. Every chipmaker designs their controllers differently. For Black Hat, we're told the following three attack devices will be demonstrated; these gadgets use chips made by Phison, which typically use 8051 micro-controllers: A USB thumb drive that rapidly injects key-presses to download and run malicious software before the user can stop it. This is triggered by plugging the device into the PC. A USB thumb drive that boots the PC, tampers with the operating system installation to cause further misery, and then boots the machine proper. A USB thumb drive that announces itself as a network card, allowing it to reconfigure the machine's DNS settings to redirect internet traffic into hackers' hands. Earlier this year, at Shmoocon 2014, Richard Harmamn gave a presentation on his research into analyzing USB micro-controllers and studying their firmware and security features. Phison, he pointed out, has a tool called MPAll which allows firmware to be rewritten – although it's hard work crafting a working rogue firmware as the chip internals aren't documented. 2. Security versus cost Secondly, it may be possible for device manufacturers to deal with these problems themselves. Controllers could be designed to only accept new firmware that is cryptographically proven to be legit, for example, but that would increase the complexity and the cost of these cheap-as-pennies chips. There is, though, room for increased security, we're told.

Wilders thread to follow: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/this-thumbdrive-hacks-computers-badusb-exploit-makes-devices-turn-evil.366653/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/31/black_hat_hackers_drive_truck_through_hole_in_usb_security/