HN user
For those that didn't get the reference - this is a reference to the web game pandemic in which the objective is to design a virus/bacteria/parasite to infect the entire world - Madagascar is the hardest country to infect in this game because it only has one port in the game.
I found this twitter post interesting - the dude did a writeup of how to use metasploit when both the attacker and the victim are behind nat and you are able to get code execution some how on the victim: https://twitter.com/b1tripper/status/383085600040947712
Really the key thing to focus in here, IMO, is the fact that arbitrary USB hardware firmware can be overwritten - anything taking place after complete control of the USB hardware has already been exploited and well documented; for example the teensy device and the usb rubber ducky.
wow I did not know popping the collar dated back to the 80's.... I guess three 6 mafia was right with that song: "Now ever since I can remember I been poppin' my collar Poppin' poppin' my collar, poppin' poppin' my collar"
http://www.huhmagazine.co.uk/images/uploaded/apple_clothing_...
They probably had an "appliance" that if they chose to update manually would fall out of support terms and then would be stuck with an unsupported instance of a device they likely paid tens of thousands to the vendor for the appliance, software, and support; and the vendor probably had not yet released a supported update to fix the problem.
Things could have been worse If the attacker found a way to upgrade the privileges of the user running jboss (it’s a sudoer, but the password is really hard)
NEVER GIVE THE USER YOUR APPLICATION SERVER RUNS UNDER SUDO PERMISSIONS!