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Comment by Camillo | Hacker News Reader

But why?

It's a product you can buy as a hardware producer to test if your hardware is safe against this product. So they're kind of creating their own market.

To test your USB-ports. For consumers, this isn't overly useful. This is what they write:

"Hardware designers of public machines should have a USB Kill to test their products: photo booths, copy machines, airline entertainment systems, ticket terminals, etc - anything with exposed USB ports should ensure that their systems resist electrical attacks."

Seems like a form of hardware pentesting to me, so for security experts and hardware designers, this looks like a pretty useful tool. :)

Sadly as with all forms of pentesting there is the flip side: Unprotected systems are vulnerable to attacks. Imagine one attacker distracting the victim in a café and the other attacker quickly inserting the Kill stick. Sort of a hardware Denial of Service.

I am going to research for lockable USB dongles you can insert and remove only with a key.

One example: http://www.connectworld.net/syscon/usb_security.html

> Imagine one attacker distracting the victim in a café and the other attacker quickly inserting the Kill stick. Sort of a hardware Denial of Service.

You're in a coffee shop. Wouldn't the attackers just "accidentally" spill coffee on your laptop? Some laptops cope well with water from the top (over the keyboard) but not in the air vents.

> Wouldn't the attackers just "accidentally" spill coffee on your laptop?

The difference is deniability, you can always see that someone killed your laptop with coffee or smashed it with a hammer, with this you wouldn't know until you can examine the circuits.

And even then, power surges do happen. Circuitry get fried from time to time. There is still a level of plausible deniability.

At least the kill shield looks pretty useful for the paranoid among us (which is basically everyone here at some point).

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