I'm guessing the cable has an esp8266 on board which you can get cheaply and is only a few mm2. It has WiFi and WiFi direct support and is powerful enough to run a webserver. Probably there are plenty chips that do the job, but the esp8266 (and its successor esp32) is very popular for custom hardware due to being cheap and easy to program

https://theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-454-mike-grover/ goes into the tradeoffs and techniques required to get the board so thin

How would the board in the cable know what WiFi to connect to, and how would it run shell commands via USB?

If you know the wifi environment of your intended victim, you could pre-configure it with the network in question.

It says it has a wifi chip. So the attack is limited by that distance.

It probably switches on the Keyboard/Mouse Logic as necessary.

But from there you could play an “Open Terminal” and be quite creative. Don’t know if you could send much information back, but I don’t see why it couldn’t have a few gb of flash storage to copy from/to, e.g. occasional screenshots to see what’s there. Or files.

You could easily use the host computer's internet connection to upload data or to execute commands downloaded from a control server.

If that was your vector, you wouldn’t bother with wifi at all.

I think the real value of this attack is against air-gapped computers... that people charge their wireless devices with? That would be stupid.

> I think the real value of this attack is against air-gapped computers... that people charge their wireless devices with? That would be stupid.

This is how Stuxnet ruined Iran's nuclear centrifuges.

Maybe not distance-limited.

> "But the cable can be configured to act as a client to a nearby wireless network. And if that wireless network has an internet connection, the distance basically becomes unlimited." he added.