181–190 of 224 posts
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If you use that word again, we'll have to ask you to leave. They're water pipes .
Head shop I used to go to in the mid-90s kept their "water pipes" in a locked back room. You couldn't even buy one unless they'd deemed you "hip to it, man" or whatever.
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In that case, you want to do a lot more than brick it; you want to destroy disks, ROM, and in many cases even PCB boards. Explosives will destroy, but recognizable parts will survive. Your safest bet probably is burning your computer, fast and thoroughly. I think white phosphorous is a popular choice for this kind of thing because it’s relatively easy and safe to transport, store, and deploy (compared to, say, strong…
What about thermite? Melt right through the steel platters of a hard disk!
Search for "and that's how I lost my other eye" from defcon23. Probably available on YouTube.
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I'm not sure Japan is a good comparison, it is so different culturally that you can't read much into the differences.
Can you elaborate more about how the culture would compensate for lower crime?
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> Is there any device that is supposed to survive this? There used to be... As a boy - and this is many, many years ago - I once, ehm, accidentally connected the external speaker-plug on an old vacuum tube household radio to the 220V mains. A very loud bang, and the house went dark. The radio, however, was fine, although with an interesting new tonal slant to everything.
Because radios in those days were made properly, without planned obsolescence!
I repair & build vacuum tube equipment as a hobby.
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Ethernet will probably do fine. The differential pair ends in a transformer, so unless you pump so much current in that it physically melts the transformer or wire, you'll be fine. USB should be similar, but apparently is not. (In the case of the USB killer, the amount of time where 200V is applied to the circuit is probably very tiny. I imagine it's just a charge pump that charges a tiny capacitor and discharges it.…
In college I stripped one end of an Ethernet cord and plugged it into household current. The other end I had hooked up to an old laptop I no longer wanted. The wire exploded, and the motherboard was fried. YMMV. Laptop was an old Sony Vaio c. 2001 vintage if it makes a difference. (On the plus side, this made up for sleeping through that physics class where my professor did the exploding wires demo.)
Maybe the student thought that it was a normal flash drive and tried to find a working computer that can open it? Also, isn't ten years too much for just destroying a property? It's not like anyone got hurt.
> "I'm going to kill this guy," "it's dead," and "it's gone. Boom," Akuthota said on recordings obtained by the prosecution.
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The innocuous use of TV-B-Gone devices was to shut off at once all TV sets at malls; it was rather a prank than a destructive act, with the added benefit of getting some peace.
Was there a TV-come-on to turn on the mall TVs in the morning?
foreach offcode in list_of_offcodes:
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Bad choice as an example of social engineering, not funny, and doesn’t make sense at all.
I don't think that it was a joke or made in bad faith - rather to demonstrate the logical extreme. Essentially that the logical extreme of dropping computer-destroying USBs to demonstrate that one shouldn't plug strange USBs in the first place is akin to destroying an office that you talked yourself into to prove that you shouldn't have been let in in the first place. Perhaps "shooting up" was a tad too far, but with…
Using a computer-destroying USB stick as an example of physical security threats misunderstands the nature and motivations of attackers. Everyone past childhood (and some in childhood, sadly) understands that there are a few people in this world whose motivation is to cause destruction and hurt simply because they find destruction and hurt enjoyable in themselves. They also understand that such people are rare, and that their threat modeling (which everyone does, even if they don't call it that) should rationally respond to such people by almost ignoring them—otherwise you find yourself not leaving your house for fear that there's a gunman on your block.
The motivations of people who want to actually get something out of you are quite different. They're not interested in destruction, because that would harm their target. They're usually interested in being undetectable. A social engineer will pretend to be locked out, ask meekly to be let in, and behave like a normal employee until they get what they need and leave normally. Defenses like "don't let people tailgate" work for those people. A gunman will just shoot you, break the door, ignore the alarm, and keep shooting until the cops kill them.
Similarly, someone who's trying to attack your business with a malicious USB drive will give you a USB drive that appears to be a normal one, that maybe pops up a terminal window very briefly and then disappears. You likely won't notice that you made a mistake, and you'll probably see an actual drive pop up on screen. Someone who's trying to attack your business will generally not give you a USB drive that destroys your computer immediately. (For most businesses, computers are not worth much compared to the secrecy of the data they contain, anyway, which is why full-disk encryption is a reasonable defense; it assumes that a computer might be lost and that this is recoverable.)
So a good security training program should say "These are ways where people might try to subtly break in to gain access that you might not have thought of before," not "Sadistic sociopaths exist, wear plate armor at all time."
What is a "computer-enhanced podium"? Why would I ever plug a usb stick into a podium?