source? I've heard of fake charges being planted with exfiltration circuitry as part of a targeted attack (eg. by red teams or actual bad guys), but I haven't heard of aliexpress vendors shipping them out en-masse.
We had a compromised machine (linux) and had to un-plug it...
BUT
On the security calls was an interesting conversation about the Chinese infiltration of Lockheed.
Lockheed, had at the time, only (3) three egress connects to the internet.
The chinese did the following:
1. They did phishing attacks on those who worked at Lockheed + plus their orbit who attended various conferences and events... giving them seemingly valid contact info (business cards and such) of their agents who also attended said events.
2. Would email the Lockheed Targets and in the emails contain links to military phishing links which would install malware on said target's machine...
3. Would trickle out data so as not to be exposed...
4. Would attack known international suppliers of Lockheed's sub-components through air-gap measures (meaning that Lockheed epoxied USB ports in machines and suppliers were (ironically) then required to transfer data via USB sticks... and China was infecting the machine which the supplier was loading the USB sticks with such to infect Lockheed employees once they received and connected said sticks...
How this was discovered:
Lockheed employees bitches about machine being slow. Investigation ensues and the trickle malware is discovered;
The chinese know they have been discovered and they open the floodgates on all their bots within Lockheed...
HUGE firehose...
Lockheed had to shut down all three egress until resolution...
Yeah, china is in EVERYTHING.
There is so much dark in tech. Spying on all levels. Every single thing you say is now not only subject to legal action, but also dark pools of intel action...
Anyone ever notice that palantir has dropped off the HN map? Yeah...
Look at reddit driving the narratives these days... I have stories about exactly when and how reddit began to drive the negative narrative....
Fuck them all...
Reality is being coopted by ...
I think you're conflating two separate issues. IIRC, I think the exfiltration concerns were more for "in place" chargers at places like airports. There's definitely a separate retail "fake Apple charger" problem, but that has more to do with safety and quality control.
It wouldn't make much sense for a retail fake Apple charter to have exfiltration circuitry, because then you run into the problem of how to exfiltrate some rando's data from some random charter. Also I'm guessing that stuff would be expensive. It really only makes sense to me for a thing like that to be a targeted attack (e.g. swap out some research scientist's charger at a conference, and place an exfiltration receiver near his hotel room).
> I even have a few "data condoms" leftover from those years. (If you don't remember, they're little dongles you put between your USB cable and the USB charger that only have the power lines connected.)
Those are useful for other things. For instance, I have some devices that deactivate and switch to transfer mode when they connect to data, so I use those for charging those devices while I'm still using them. Also, I think they can allow faster charging from a data-enabled port in some cases.
But the bad press and bad customer experience from people having problems with "Apple" chargers probably does.
It's called protecting the brand.
This is one of the big reasons that Apple locked down its Lightning/USB ports so hard.
There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. It was a huge topic in tech circles, and on HN, at the time. I even have a few "data condoms" leftover from those years. (If you don't remember, they're little dongles you put between your USB cable and the USB charger that only have the power lines connected.)
The fact that it also locked out bad cops was a bonus.