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USBKill — Code That Kills Computers Before They Examine USBs for Secrets

USBKill — Code That Kills Computers Before They Examine USBs for Secrets
May 05, 2015
USBkill — A new program that once activated, will instantly disable the laptop or computer if there is any activity on USB port. Hey Wait, don't compare USBkill with the USB Killer stick that destroy sensitive components of a computer when plugged-in. "USBKill" is a new weapon that could be a boon for whistleblowers, journalists, activists, and even cyber criminals who want to keep their information away from police and cyber thieves. It is like, if you are caught, kill yourself. In the same fashion as terrorists do. Here I am not talking about to kill yourself, but to kill the data from your laptop if the law enforcement has caught your laptop. USBkill does exactly this by turning a thumb drive into a kill switch that if unplugged, forces systems to shut down. Hephaestos ( @h3phaestos ), the author of USBkill, reports that the tool will help prevent users from becoming the next Ross Ulbricht , founder of the infamous underground drug marketplace

This 'Killer USB' can make your Computer explode

This 'Killer USB' can make your Computer explode
Mar 12, 2015
Can Hackers turn a remote computer into a bomb and explode it to kill someone, just like they do in hacker movies? Wait, wait! Before answering that, Let me tell you an interesting story about Killer USB drive: A man walking in the subway stole a USB flash drive from the outer pocket of someone else's bag. The pendrive had "128" written on it. After coming home, he inserted the pendrive into his laptop and instead discovering any useful data, he burnt half of his laptop down. The man then took out the USB pendrive, replaced the text "128" with "129" and put it in the outer pocket of his bag… Amen! I'm sure, you would really not imagine yourself being the 130th victim of this Killer perdrive, neither I. This above story was told to a Russian researcher, nicknamed Dark Purple, who found the concept very interesting and developed his own computer-frying USB Killer pendrive. He is working with electronic manufacturing company from where

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future
Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
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