Even since smartphones became mainstream we have fallen in situations where we have forgotten our charging cables at home and our devices are low on power. We assume that there’s no harm in borrowing a colleagues a colleague’s charger however, in 2019 cybersecurity experts says you should protect your charging cable Ike your protect your password and sharing could be a huge mistake.
“There are certain things in life that you just don’t borrow,” says Charles Henderson, Global Managing Partner and Head of X-Force Red at IBM Security. Henderson runs a team of hackers that clients hire to break into their computer systems in order to expose vulnerabilities.
Since cyberhackers have figured out how to implant charging cables with malware that can remotely hijack devices and computers, his team sometimes uses a trick to teach clients to be less trusting of third-party charging cables.
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Last month, at the annual DEF CON Hacking Conference in Las Vegas “hacker summer camp,” says Henderson a hacker who goes by “MG” demonstrated an iPhone lightning cable that he had modified.
After using the cable to connect an iPod to a Mac computer, MG remotely accessed the cable’s IP address and took control of the Mac, as Vice reported in play-by-play fashion.
Malicious charging cable aren’t a widespread threat at this time mainly because this kind of attack doesn’t scale real well, so if you saw it, it would be a very targeted attack.
“But just because we haven’t yet seen a widespread attack doesn’t mean we won’t see it, because it certainly does work,” says Henderson.
The technology is really small and really cheap. It can get so small that it looks like an ordinary charging cable but have the capability and intelligence to plant malware on its victim.
My Henderson further went ahead and noted that we should be mindful about where we plug our devices. “Think of it in the same way that you think about opening mail attachments or sharing passwords.”
In a computing context, sharing charging cable is like sharing your password, because that’s the level of access you’re crucially conveying with these types of technology.
