A charging cable capable of chaos!

This seems like your normal USB Cable, right? Plug it in your PC and this seemingly harmless cable can hack into your digital life completely as it behaves maliciously stealing your private data.

What is this cable? Named O.M.G Cable, it is a cable that comes with a built-in Wi-Fi microcontroller inside the connector port created by security researcher MG. This particular USB cable has been created in a new series of penetration testing tools. The company first gave a demo at the DEF CON hacking conference in 2019 and then quickly went to mass production, and cybersecurity vendor Hak5 started selling the cables soon after. This ‘O.MG cable’ is practically indistinguishable from any ordinary USB cable you see out in the market.  

MG said in an online chat that people claimed that Type-C was safe from this as it did not have enough space, so they had to be proven wrong. 

These OMG cables basically work by creating a Wi-Fi hotspot that a hacker can connect from their own device. From there, an interface opens up in any ordinary web browser that lets the hacker record all the user’s keystrokes. 

The tests have been done in relative proximity, but MG said they’ve improved the range of the cables.

MG said that the pandemic has caused an issue in their manufacturing process. “The pandemic has made an already difficult process much more difficult with the chip shortage. If any individual component is out of stock, it is basically impossible to find a replacement when fractions of millimeters are important. So I just have to wait 12+ months for certain parts to be in stock,” MG explained in an online chat. 

“We will easily lose $10K (Dh36,732) in cables when testing a process change. During the chip shortage, it’s hard not to look at a loss like that and see a whole bunch of dead components that cannot be replaced for over a year,” he added.

Until they find a way to make hacking easy, we hope someone invents protection devices to protect our data from such alarming and easy-to-buy hacking tools.