How hackable is it? That could be useful

Integrating everything into USB has been great at physical simplification, but it really opened up the attack surface.

First party malware is the worst.

From the photos, this looks like a Lightning cable, not a USB cable.

They're referring to the USB protocol, which lightning uses.

Can't wait for the consumer keyboard that saves everything that was typed to it and/or executes things on its own

usb keyloggers have existed since just after USB came out, and badusb is totally a thing.

They have, but all of them are "personalized" attacks - as in, a malicious person needs to install these on specifically your computer, without your knowledge. What I was talking about is some kind of device from some noname Chinese manufacturer that presents as harmless, but actually sends off some additional data back home

Yeah, it was sold to schools in the 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

Oh yeah, I remember reading about the AlphaSmart somewhere! Though it is quite different from an ordinary-keyboard-looking spying device that I tried to describe in my original comment. The AlphaSmart feels like more of a digital typewriter that just had a really primitive data transfer method

Not at all.

Usbc is just the connector.

Running display port graphics over usbc is no less safe than using a bigger display port connector.

Can a rogue displayport peripheral present as a storage device, keyboard, etc?

Answer is "it depends".

USB-C always has a usb2 channel available, then 4 lanes that can be display port or thunderbolt or usb2/3 or whatever else.

This is why most android phones have options for USB including "charge only".

Right but a normal DisplayPort or Mini DisplayPort connector doesn’t have USB…

It's not THAT weird. Lightning can't carry HDMI at all so even Apple's official adaptor is essentially setting up an Airplay connection over USB and has an ARM SoC to handle it. I'm guessing 3rd parties can't do the same trick without Apple's blessing which results in scary seeming workarounds.

Do you have a source on that? I ask because it’s genuinely such a cool thing but I can’t find anything about it online even though I have seen this mentioned before.

Seems to have been debunked.

The premise (low end soc streaming video over usb) is not debunked at all.

There are lots of third-party HDMI adapters for cheap on Amazon that work as a clone of Apple's with no need for any software. Might not be legal but they do work.

Agreed. If you want to prove to yourself that this vulnerability is real, consider that you can replicate the hypothesized malicious device you describe by taking a WiFi Duck https://wifiduck.com/ and combining it with a regular lightning-to-HDMI adapter by plugging the WiFi Duck into the extra lightning port on the HDMI adapter. All that would be needed to use this attack on an unsuspecting victim would be to combine the WiFi Duck and the HDMI adapter functionality into a small enough circuit board to fit into the Apple-style white enclosure.

Can you pull video and input both emulated keyboard and mouse via a lightning port, all concurrently, or is that theoretical?

I was mulling over a (legitimate) project recently and couldn't find any information about them all together.