{"id":12539,"date":"2016-07-08T10:44:17","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T14:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/?p=12539"},"modified":"2020-02-26T11:10:01","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T16:10:01","slug":"badusb-solved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/badusb-solved\/12539\/","title":{"rendered":"Our cure for BadUSB"},"content":{"rendered":"

A virus that discreetly infests hardware may be the user\u2019s worst nightmare. Hardware attacks are much scarier than attacks on the operating system because ordinary antivirus scans don\u2019t examine systems at the hardware level. Such attacks pose a very real threat because every day we use hardware that has exploitable<\/a> vulnerabilities. For example, a couple of years ago researchers found an inherent flaw in the USB interface. They called it BadUSB.<\/p>\n

By tampering just slightly with the USB device\u2019s firmware code, an outside party can modify it and inject malware that makes the compromised device pretend it is something else.<\/p>\n

After such a modification, an ordinary thumb drive might, for example, impersonate a USB keyboard and input certain commands \u2014 say, to erase all of your files. Or it could pretend it\u2019s a network adapter and listen to the data flow between a computer and the Internet.<\/p>\n

The problem is that such malware is stored in the thumb drive\u2019s controller, invisible from the outside. An ordinary antivirus product cannot dig that deep: It does not see any viruses on the flash drive because the malware is on a much lower layer than a standard antivirus sweep checks. The second issue is that there is no cure for the inherent USB flaw.<\/p>\n

\n

5 threats that could affect hardware \u2013 http:\/\/t.co\/CP1DSfkgy3<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/cnse35hAr3<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Kaspersky (@kaspersky) April 27, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n