Your phone’s battery is low, so you grab the provided charging cable at the coffee shop while ordering something. But it’s no ordinary USB cable, and the coffee shop owner didn’t include it either.
This USB will BURN ANY DEVICE…. #Shorts
One problem with using USB cables for charging is that they also carry data, in and out of your phone, including malware (in) and private information (out). And the O.MG cable, which looks like any other USB-C to Lightning cable, is essentially a tiny hacking computer in a cable. Is anyone going to attack you personally with something like that? Unlikely. But ask yourself this: If you were going to deploy a cable to catch the most people, where would you put it?
“Consumers should be careful about the cables they use and the ports they plug into, as both white and black hat hackers are constantly coming up with new ways to hack via USB. And even if a USB cable isn’t malicious, many cables don’t conform to standards like USB-C and can cause other electrical or mechanical problems,” Sean O’Brien, a cybersecurity professor at Yale Law School, told Lifewire via email.
The O.MG Cable is the latest version of a hacking tool from hacker MG (Mike Grover), introduced at the Def Con hacking conference. It looks like any other cable, except it houses a small Wi-Fi access point, essentially giving a hacker a path into your computer. It can also connect over the internet, not just to a hacker nearby with his laptop open.