There is this company in Hong Kong that has made an USB killer and told the computing world about the dangers of it.
Basically it draws power from the computer and sends it back!
This will efficiently kill your hardware if you have done nothing to protect your USB port from this. One can only speculate why the computing world has so little interest in securing the USB port but Apple has secured its hardware from this so that it cannot receive back the damaging power stream.
The Hong Kong guys have made the industry aware of this issue one year ago so now they are releasing the product for security testing purposes.
To avoid the disaster you can buy an adapter that will prevent the power from flowing back to your hardware.
This will probably not prevent the stealing of data so you have to use an USB condom on your mobile devices too.
Basically those Hong Kong guys are creating the problem and double the sales by creating the solution. That makes their noble motives questionable, but they are right about it being a problem and that some dishonest crooks would have done it sooner or later anyway.
Also the computer industry has done nothing about it despite fair warnings.
More here
The USB Killer
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The USB Killer
Manjaro 64bit on the main box -Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz and nVidia Corporation GT200b [GeForce GTX 275] (rev a1. + Centos on the server - Arch on the laptop.
"There are no stupid questions - Only stupid answers!"
"There are no stupid questions - Only stupid answers!"
Re: The USB Killer
Read about it few days back; interesting gadget.
Re: The USB Killer
Yes Those USB ports need to be filled with Bubble gum
Manjaro 64bit on the main box -Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz and nVidia Corporation GT200b [GeForce GTX 275] (rev a1. + Centos on the server - Arch on the laptop.
"There are no stupid questions - Only stupid answers!"
"There are no stupid questions - Only stupid answers!"