Inside a low budget consumer hardware espionage implant (2018)

https://ha.cking.ch/s8_data_line_locator/

by lelf • 7 years ago

210 43 7 years ago

ha.cking.ch

nitemice• 7 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15676737

That's site's borked for me. Instead here's google's text-cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:O79WUSl...

DigitalTerminal• 7 years ago

Cool. I'm suddenly conscious of all the USB plugs that exist in my immediate surroundings.

wjnc• 7 years ago

After also reading the discussion in '17. How come this is trivially easy to make, very cheap and still we have a massive stolen car problem in Europe? Some cars in my country have >1% chance of getting stolen in a given year. The incentives must be off somewhere? This is a device that could only be triggered after theft, thus hardly any privacy concerns, and still give quite a good location (perhaps improved with glonass and other sattelites). They can't be found easily (so small, only transmissions after stealing) and placed on any given wire in the car. Seems only beatable by placing the car in a cage after theft.

amelius• 7 years ago

By the way, I think such devices exist for pets.

2rsf2• 7 years ago

They do, I developed the basis for a pet tracker more than 10 years ago, actually the highest cost for them is the cellular plan and monthly service fees for the service.

2rsf2• 7 years ago

The Israeli Ituran has a similar service for cars, although I think they are based on cellular location and not GPS. There are few problems with that though- thieves know where and how to disable the device, even if you can locate the car you need someone to go and fetch it- most of the times this will be in place you don't want to go to alone, and a problem unique to Israel is that thieves can cross the border to the Palestinian Authority before you can deploy any police force to stop them.

Scoundreller4• 7 years ago

No exit controls in Israel? Or not enough time to get the car on a list?

pjc50• 7 years ago

Various services exist for this already, but someone has to pay the ongoing SIM fees. Criminals are also surprisingly good at removing them, and the higher value cars are usually stolen with the keys and then immediately containerised for export.

Or the cars are stolen for use in some other crime and then abandoned, sometimes even before the owner knows about it.

michaelt2• 7 years ago

According to [1] in the UK car thefts peaked in 1993 at 36 incidents per thousand car-owning households, and it's now dropped to 4.

Is there really still a massive stolen car problem?

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47023003

richrichardsson• 7 years ago

UK != Europe, saying that I don't know if 660k thefts EU-wide in 2016 [1] constitutes a "massive problem" or not, comes to around 0.1% thefts per person (assuming a rough 500 million EU population).

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

toyg• 7 years ago

Anecdotally, there are still a few issues for the extreme ends of the market - luxury (high effort, high returns) and bangers (very low effort, typically cut for parts). Anything in between (“sensibly priced cars”, to use a clarksonism) is too much effort and risk for not enough returns.

But yes, it’s nowhere as bad as it was in the ‘80s/‘90s. This has to do with social changes (the drop in heroin use and crime, and general improvement in living standards) as much as with technological ones (alarms installed by default, electronic locks on injection).

jstanley2• 7 years ago

This is a device that could only be triggered after theft, thus hardly any privacy concerns

How would the car know when it has been stolen?

hoseja• 7 years ago

I assume by you sending it and activation SMS.

bouk• 7 years ago

we have a massive stolen car problem in Europe

Any kind of generalization like that for all of Europe is bound to be wrong

swarnie_• 7 years ago

If you trust the RAC around 110k cars were stolen last year in the UK out of 38+ million.

Assume all cars are created and stolen equal that's not really a massive problem in my world.

jf• 7 years ago

What's a good RF detector to get? This post ends with the author pointing out that the implant can be detected with a cheap RF detector. I'm interested in getting myself an RF detector to play with but I'm overwhelmed by what I see on Amazon.

Tepix• 7 years ago

A CC308 from AliExpress is one of the cheapest options at less than $7.

monkeynotes• 7 years ago

Plot twist, cheap Chinese RF detector has snooping built in, turns off radio when RF detector is in use, silently goes back to reporting when unit is not in use.

You can't beat a determined opposition casually.

Kliment• 7 years ago

Easy way to detect this without an RF detector - use a "usb charge doctor" which is a super cheap voltage and current measurement tool for USB. If the cable draws current with nothing attached, dissect it.

Incidentally, my theory about the website and product is that this is a firmware reuse of a fleet tracking product. The manufacturer is likely an electronics manufacturing outfit that adapted the layout to match the new application but didn't have in-house firmware developers and instead reused a popular low-end fleet tracker firmware for the same chip. These are used for stuff like taxi dispatch or package pickup so you can see the entire fleet on a map and call whoever is closest to your destination. It doesn't need precise location.

speaker1• 7 years ago

usb-c cables seem to drain power, at least both I have, though one of them has LED.

NullPrefix• 7 years ago

Type C cables have chips in them. Not a dumb wire. That's by design

xoa• 7 years ago

I've never tried it now that I think about it, but how standardized is the USB-C cable drain? I would assume that, with perhaps some minimal difference for length, all normal in-spec cables would be pretty similar, but I don't actually know that and would be curious if anyone has checked a few.

If there is a standard baseline though then the OP's advice doesn't meaningfully change, it just becomes "If the cable draws current over the baseline with nothing attached, dissect it" rather then "if it draws any at all". Any spy chip would still have to be on top of whatever else is needed to make the cable work at all, so it's not really a different problem unless standard cables have enough delta between them to hide a spy chip drain in. And even if that's true between manufacturers, if within a single manufacturer cables were pretty steady that might merely become a reason to source exclusively from one/a few reliable ones that stable baseline draws can be established for?

michaelt2• 7 years ago

  Incidentally, my theory about the
  website and product is that this
  is a firmware reuse of a fleet
  tracking product.

Yeah, there are already off-the-shelf products like [1] that combine GPS, battery and SMS sending. Presumably this product is a variant of one of those.

[1] https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/GPS-Tracker/223443762010

HeraldEmbar• 7 years ago

I think I'm going to run 50 volts through all my usb cables when I get home.

gruez• 7 years ago

Sounds like a great way to fry your lightning and usb-c cables as the former has a mfi chip, and the latter has a pull down resistor.

Scoundreller4• 7 years ago

I guess the secure solution is to carry around your own X-Ray verified lightning-USB dongle and high voltage fry any dumb cable you find yourself needing.

danesparza3• 7 years ago

And why 50? That's so arbitrary. Why not 120? Or 240? Or 9?

antsar2• 7 years ago

(IANAEE) 120 and 240 are a bit more painful when mistakes happen. And 9 seems too low (normal USB voltage is 5, so 9 might be within safety margins).

bb882• 7 years ago

FYI, if you're looking for a good usb power meter, I have this one and it seems pretty decent.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32855845265.html

Inside a low budget consumer hardware espionage implant (2018)

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