In the short video posted by the hackers, the USB is shown in action – all it takes is plugging it into the hacker’s IBM laptop, and it completely kills the machine within seconds.
After the laptop turns off, the demonstrator in the video tries repeatedly to turn it back on but it seems that the USB has blown its circuit in the process.
Video courtesy: The Dailymail
The USB destroys laptops by sending 220 volts through the signal lines of the USB interface, rendering anything it is plugging into useless.
Dark Purple claims in a Russian-language blog post that the attack is not just limited to computers, but can used to incapacitate almost anything equipped with a USB drive. The examples he gives are smart phones that support USB mode, TVs, routers, modems, etc. His goal, he writes, is to test prototypes of “devices that perform only one function – the destruction of computers.”
“It is extremely unlikely that the hard disk or the information on it was damaged,” he wrote.
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