News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables Will Hijack Your Computer. Parent comment

Re:Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables Will Hijack Your Co... by tda on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @01:27PM (#20688055)
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
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables Will Hijack Your Co... by Maxious on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @06:35PM (#20690950)
https://theamphour.com/the-amp-hour-454-mike-grover/ goes into the tradeoffs and techniques required to get the board so thin
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables Will Hijack Your Co... by MuffinFlavored on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @03:46PM (#20689519)
How would the board in the cable know what WiFi to connect to, and how would it run shell commands via USB?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables Will Hijack Your Co... by eridius on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @03:24AM (#20693374)
If you know the wifi environment of your intended victim, you could pre-configure it with the network in question.
[ Parent | on HN ]