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Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it

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Re: Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it

#72
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can just make it type words, what's the risk in that?" Makes you wonder what other peripheral companies out there are also operating with seemingly no security team. There must be other vulnerabilities like this just waiting to be discovered. My brother was awoken one morning at 2am because some neighborhood kids connected to his bluetooth speaker and blasted fart sounds on loop at max volume, and that's literal…

> "You can just make it type words, what's the risk in that?" I don't know if it's a useful answer to people saying this kind of stuff, but here are some examples of other attacks arbitrary USB pwn allows. A USB device can appear as a network adapter and most OS will happily route all your traffic there, so your speaker can know which porn you're looking at! It can also appear as a DisplayLink dongle, so it can see w…

The ability to "type words" is worse than all of that. Just type Win+R, "cmd", Enter and you've got arbitrary code execution on the connected PC. I think that was GP's point. Any competent security team would be aware of such risks.

Re: Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it

#73
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can just make it type words, what's the risk in that?" Makes you wonder what other peripheral companies out there are also operating with seemingly no security team. There must be other vulnerabilities like this just waiting to be discovered. My brother was awoken one morning at 2am because some neighborhood kids connected to his bluetooth speaker and blasted fart sounds on loop at max volume, and that's literal…

> "You can just make it type words, what's the risk in that?" I don't know if it's a useful answer to people saying this kind of stuff, but here are some examples of other attacks arbitrary USB pwn allows. A USB device can appear as a network adapter and most OS will happily route all your traffic there, so your speaker can know which porn you're looking at! It can also appear as a DisplayLink dongle, so it can see w…

See also the debacle with Razer gaming mice giving you root access just by plugging in, which I think takes the cake for clownshoe software practices almost rivalling Riot Games (though not with the latter's degree of self-congratulatory Dunning-Kruger gusto.)

Re: Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it

#74
post #51

While the article only talks about using this as a USB HID keyboard to send attacks, surely if you spent more time creating an evil firmware from scratch you could do much more than this? You could bridge any information from USB -> Bluetooth.

What Bluetooth profile would allow "more" than a HID?

Re: Pwnd Blaster: Hacking your PC using your speaker without ever touching it

#76

what ways are there to protect from malicious HID device?

I know of https://usbguard.github.io/

But I remember that on Linux changing some /etc/udev file helped me with some naggy bug long ago. I worked temporary in an office with several wonky USB keyboards. Whenever someone disconnected their tablet or laptop from their KB (ie shut the lid), my linux would pick it up and suddenly connect to this KB. A little googling and some trial-error and I had my linux set-up that it would only connect to whitelisted USB devices.

Which, months later, caused me insane headaches when I could not find why a new USB microphone wasn't working, despite it being advertised as "works on linux"....

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