Author Topic: Future death of the personal computer?  (Read 19548 times)

David Kiley

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Re: Future death of the personal computer?
« Reply #30 on: February 22, 2020, 07:36:54 am »
Another interesting attack vector is USB sticks. There's cases of them having an extra keyboard controller to inject commands, not really a worry for us besides making things unstable and the scariest is USB devices designed to kill your computer, a big capacitor or such injecting a large voltage through your USB port. Depending on the motherboards design, it might only blow a fuse or might fry the board.
Always be careful of USB sticks found in a parking lot :)
After you mentioned it I surfed around and found a video of the killer usb stick being used on different devices, including a car:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4OmkBYB4HY

Yeah i'm not using strange usb sticks now :). Not that I was before but i'm really not now.

So enough of these being distributed could definitely lead to the death of the personal computer  ;D
« Last Edit: February 22, 2020, 07:42:59 am by David Kiley »

David Kiley

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Re: Future death of the personal computer?
« Reply #31 on: February 29, 2020, 05:10:40 am »
A few days later, when I started up Firefox (OS/2) Something started to cause process dumps, about every 10 seconds. When I investigated that, it was a program called HELLO. When I investigated that, it was probably one of those things that encrypts your data, with an offer to decrypt it, if you pay <whatever> within a few hours. So, technically, the plugs didn't cause the problem, but what they did, was open the path through port 6667 (internet relay chat), and as soon as something (Firefox) opened the port, it was in, and tried to run. If it had actually succeeded, it probably still wouldn't do much damage, because of an unknown directory structure, but. After that, I also had some weird settings in my router. Fortunately, a factory reset fixed that problem. The plugs went back, since they didn't seem to be interested in fixing the problem.

So, OS/2 saved me, that time. Over the years, I have often noticed that Firefox would simply crash, for no obvious reason. I assume that some of those crashes were bad code in Firefox, but I am pretty sure that a lot of them were malware trying to do something.
Wait are you saying this program was running from os/2? How did it install itself?
Seriously freaky if so.

Doug Bissett

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Re: Future death of the personal computer?
« Reply #32 on: February 29, 2020, 07:24:35 am »
Quote
Wait are you saying this program was running from os/2? How did it install itself?
Seriously freaky if so.

It came in on the IRC channel, and tried to run. I got a Process dump of it failing, about every 20 seconds, until I closed Firefox. I added port 6667 to my firewall, and haven't seen it again. I do hope that those who produced it feel very bad that I didn't pay them.

It is not so freaky. Firefox is full of holes like that. Fortunately, I didn't find out if Firefox, in windows, would do the same thing.