BadUSB exploit - What you need to know

A new exploit named 'BadUSB' has emerged. What makes this exploit one of the most dangerous exploits is its silent nature and that it is completely undetectable by current antiviruses leaving us in the open.

BadUSB leaves current antivirus useless and harmless.

What this threat do, and what makes it so hard to deal with? It’s its very nature that makes it no average threat.

BadUSB isn't like any other exploit. Instead of infecting your computer what it aims is at are the usb peripherals attached to it. This makes it quite unique aswell as dangerous. We have some sort of usb peripheral connected to our computers at some point. Unfortunately this exploit also affects Android smartphones aswell.

It is nearly impossible to clean without taking measures, like disassembling infected devices and reverse-engineering them. Trying to wipe the infection with an anti-virus will also be useless, since this hack affects devices’ very firmware. For the same reason, simply formatting, say, a USB flash drive will do nothing. This process only cleans the storage, not the firmware.

“The next time you have a virus on your computer, you pretty much have to assume your peripherals are infected, and computers of other people who connected to those peripherals are infected.” -Karsten Nohl, chief scientist at Security Research Labs

It turns out using USB devices does much more than just allow a connection to your computer. It opens a portal and gives peripherals excessive access to your hardware and software. Nohl explains using a USB device is much like saying “here’s my computer; I’m going to walk away for 10 minutes. Please don’t do anything evil.”

Knowing it affects Android makes us raise an eyebrow, but it seems this exploit is not very widely known yet. Its unveiling at next week’s convention may spark a chain of projects that could protect us in the future.