Quick! The bad guy/super villain has left the room! Plug in a mysterious device thatll hack up their computer while an on-screen progress bar ticks forward to convey to the audience that things are working!

Its a classic scene from basically every spy movie in history. In this case, however, that mystery device is real.

Samy Kamkar developer of projects like that massive worm that conquered MySpace back in 2006, or SkyJack, the drone that hijacks other drones has released a video demonstrating the abilities of a particularly ridiculous necklace he sometimes wears around.

Called USBdriveby, its a USB-powered microcontroller-on-a-chain, rigged to exploit the inherently awful security flaws lurking in your computers USB ports. In about 60 seconds, it can pull off a laundry list of nasty tricks:

So in 30-60 seconds, this device hijacks your machine, disables many layers of security, cleans up the mess it makes, and opens a connection for remote manipulation even after the device has been removed. Thats kind of terrifying.

While the video above focuses on OS X, the methods tapped here arent exclusive to Apples platform. Kamkar says everything shown so far is easily extendable to Windows or *nix.

So what can you do to protect yourself from things like this? Not a whole lot, really thats why attacks like this and BadUSB are so freaky. A lot of these flaws are inherent to the way the USB protocol was designed and implemented across so many hundreds of millions of computers; short of filling your USB ports with cement or never, ever leaving your computers ports unattended while out and about, theres no magic fix.

[via Hacker News]

Originally posted here:

This Little USB Necklace Hacks Your Computer In No Time Flat