Submitted 1 year ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
Industrial CT scanner manufacturer Lumafield imaged an O.MG USB-C cable revealing sophisticated electronic components secreted within the connector.
The headline is clickbait I think. The whole point of the O.MG cable is to hide electronics in the connector. The analysis of what can be seen in there may be interesting, but it’s not like this is secret knowledge.
So the manufacturer isn’t spying on you, it just designed a product so someone else could hack you instead? That doesn’t make it sound any better.
The end result is the same: be careful what cables you plug into your device.
The intended use for this kind of product is that you hire a company to break into your company, and then tell you how they did it so that criminals (or, if you’re someone like a defence contractor, foreign spies) can’t do the same thing later. Sometimes they’re also used by journalists to prove that the government or a company isn’t taking necessary precautions or by hobbyists at events where everyone’s aware that everyone else will try to break into their stuff. There’s typically vetting of anyone buying non-hobbyist quantities of anything, and it’s all equipment within theoretical reach of organised crime or state actors, so pentesters need to have access, too, or they can’t reasonably assess the real-world threat that’s posed.
Yes, if someone used one of these against you, you could be in trouble. The company that makes it also makes a detector that can spot it:
Its designed to be used for pen testers so they don’t have to spenr $20,000 on the alternative cable. Its a single cable thats costs like $200, so im not really worried many people are going to get hacked because they accidentally bought a $200 cable.
The end result is the same: be careful what cables you plug into your device.
Sure, but this is clickbait at best. It’s not a revelation that this cable contains that hardware.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Every other page on Tom’s Hardware is loading for me just fine but this article is just pulling up a completely blank document?
lurch@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I hope you’re not hacked and the attacker is blocking URLs that could help you find out.
JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
They probably pulled the article since it was bullshit, based on the other comments.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Same here, I was wondering what was going on.
cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
same here; other articles there load fine but this one gives me HTTP 500 with content-length 0.
(the empty body tag in your screenshot is generated by firefox while rendering the zero-length response from the server, btw.)