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Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

That's why USB Kill programs [1] important.

[1] https://github.com/hephaest0s/usbkill

Interesting project but it looks to me like it's solving an entirely different problem. "usbkill is a simple program with one goal: quickly shutdown the computer when a USB is inserted or removed."

The article is referring to a USB cable that has been modified to phone home using either RF or some other covert channel. I'd think that USB Kill would be completely unaware of any such compromise given that it's only looking for a disrupted connection.

Good point. I wonder if there is a way to detect USB cable being plugged into the port?

You'd need the USB port, hub it's plugged into, all the way to the controller, to be aware of passing this information around, though you could probably use any sort of reporting on total voltage/amperage downstream for detecting it if it reported that information.

(Unfortunately, AFAIK, most USB hubs don't report power draw for devices that are "just" drawing power and don't use the data pins, so you don't get that.)

Why not just rm -rf everything and dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda? That way they won't even be able to see that anything is happening.

If I'm reading your comment correctly, you're asking why the spies don't rm -rf. That would kill any chance of them coming back to a potentially good source of intelligence.

Couldn't you be held in contempt of court for doing something like that?

You mean destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice. Contempt of court likely doesn't apply unless you were asked to turn the evidence over yourself and destroyed it.

It is likely that you could be. But as with all criminal proceedings they'd need to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. If the KillUSB software itself was unrecoverable it might prove difficult.

They'd probably have to prove you were doing this because of a pending investigation against yourself. What if you were just using it because you didn't want Zee Germans (or some other personal adversary) getting access to your data?

WoW!! This is nice!

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