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A comment on What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic one?. Parent comment

Re:What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic... by danesparza on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @04:35PM (#12696241)
Nope.

Author of this piece didn't talk about USB electrical attacks, which (IMHO) are a bit more potent and harder to spot by the untrained eye: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/usb-killer-2.0-power-surge-...

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Re:What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic... by toomanybeersies on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:28PM (#12696546)
Don't even need to go that far. Just short all the pins and you will will kill a lot of motherboards.

My friend accidentally jammed his headphones into the front USB socket on his PC and killed the motherboard. Of course it doesn't work on all computers, my old laptop would just shut down (which is still inconvenient), and I'm not sure what would happen to my Macbook (and don't want to find out).

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Re:What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic... by qb45 on Thursday October 13, 2016 @03:43AM (#12699152)
> Don't even need to go that far. Just short all the pins and you will will kill a lot of motherboards.

Interesting. USB 2.0 spec mandates overcurrent protection on the power rail and ability to withstand continuous short circuit to ground or power on the data pins. I think 3.0 lifted the latter requirement, though.

But I never tested actual hardware for that, besides power short-circuit protection which seems to work on my machine (YMMV).

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Re:What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic... by martinko on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @05:44PM (#12696647)
Jammed a dinner knife in my usb 3 port and I just got a windows notification that one of my usb ports had a power surge...
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Re:What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic... by colejohnson66 on Wednesday October 12, 2016 @09:12PM (#12697657)
How do you accidentally jam a headphone plug into a USB receptacle?
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Re:What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic... by detaro on Thursday October 13, 2016 @05:19AM (#12699475)
Blindly trying to plug it in and getting the location wrong? I've seen people jam USB sticks diagonally in Ethernet ports...
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Re:What are malicious USB keys and how to create a realistic... by toomanybeersies on Thursday October 13, 2016 @07:09AM (#12699846)
Right next to each other, and a usb port is apparently just large enough to take a 3.5 mm plug.
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