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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

#131

Post by [deleted] »

jamwise wrote: post #105
nickdothutton wrote: post #21

It is quite common to find device manufacturers, even those of many years standing, who _appear to_ begin with the device and add the software as an afterthought. Paying little attention to security or even the software lifecycle (patches, updates, the changing landscape/ecosystem). I have even known it happen that the device brand subs out the software to a random small developer, who then closes up shop/dies/gets o…

It's frightening how often this happens. And these days with the boatloads of cheap computer and phone peripherals being bought every minute there's just no realistic way for an authority to monitor and regulate all of it. I bet it's not an insignificant amount of devices out there that had their firmwares written by a "random small developer" who is in fact some kind of supply chain hacker.

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by smithkl42 »

beng-nl wrote: post #82
smithkl42 wrote: post #54

If I were in charge of, say, the Mossad, I would have as a significant part of my budget purchasing every single bluetooth device on the market, and set a bunch of underemployed Israeli CS grads to work at finding these vulnerabilities, and then putting them into an easily deployed toolkit. You want an asset with access to, say, an Iranian government office, to be able to walk through the building with a phone and ta…

Just a thought, but: maybe it’s even easier to (as well as do what you suggest, which is a good idea) build and sell buggy (ie backdoored) devices. What’s easier, marketing or finding bugs :-) (Not a rhetorical question)

Good point. The pager attack on Hezbollah was risky because it involved physically changing the pagers enough to put explosives in them. Quite a lot easier just to ship devices with some subtly insecure code.

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

#133

Post by lai0602 »

hulitu wrote: post #127
rkagerer wrote: post #99

This is a well written article and easy to digest, worth a skim. In summary he figured out how to reflash arbitrary firmware on a Creative Sound Blaster Katana V2X soundbar via Bluetooth, without requiring any effective authentication or user interaction. The soundbar is plugged directly into its host computer via USB, so by adding a descriptor to its firmware he made it recognized as a keyboard. From there it was st…

> This is a well written article But the headline is enshitified.

I think he means the article.. not the title/headline of it..
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