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Slashdot: Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables That Hack You Will Be Mass Produced and Sold

Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables That Hack You Will Be Mass Produced and Sold
Published on October 01, 2019 at 06:30AM
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Soon it may be easier to get your hands on a cable that looks just like a legitimate Apple lightning cable, but which actually lets you remotely take over a computer. The security researcher behind the recently developed tool announced over the weekend that the cable has been successfully made in a factory. MG is the creator of the O.MG Cable. It charges phones and transfers data in the same way an Apple cable does, but it also contains a wireless hotspot that a hacker can connect to. Once they've done that, a hacker can run commands on the computer, potentially rummaging through a victim's files, for instance. After demoing the cable for Motherboard at the Def Con hacking conference this summer, MG said "It's like being able to sit at the keyboard and mouse of the victim but without actually being there." At the time, MG was selling the handmade cables at the conference for $200 each. Now that production process has been streamlined. This doesn't necessarily mean that factories are churning out O.MG Cables right now, but it shows that their manufacture can be fully outsourced, and MG doesn't have to make the cables by hand.

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