The New USB Rubber Ducky Is More Dangerous Than Ever

The USB Rubber Ducky "has a new incarnation, released to coincide with the Def Con hacking conference this year," reports The Verge. From the report: To the human eye, the USB Rubber Ducky looks like an unremarkable USB flash drive. Plug it into a computer, though, and the machine sees it as a USB keyboard -- which means it accepts keystroke commands from the device just as if a person was typing them in. The original Rubber Ducky was released over 10 years ago and became a fan favorite among hackers (it was even featured in a Mr. Robot scene). There have been a number of incremental updates since then, but the newest Rubber Ducky makes a leap forward with a set of new features that make it far more flexible and powerful than before. With the right approach, the possibilities are almost endless. Already, previous versions of the Rubber Ducky could carry out attacks like creating a fake Windows pop-up box to harvest a user's login credentials or causing Chrome to send all saved passwords to an attacker's webserver. But these attacks had to be carefully crafted for specific operating systems and software versions and lacked the flexibility to work across platforms. The newest Rubber Ducky aims to overcome these limitations. It ships with a major upgrade to the DuckyScript programming language, which is used to create the commands that the Rubber Ducky will enter into a target machine. While previous versions were mostly limited to writing keystroke sequences, DuckyScript 3.0 is a feature-rich language, letting users write functions, store variables, and use logic flow controls (i.e., if this... then that). That means, for example, the new Ducky can run a test to see if it's plugged into a Windows or Mac machine and conditionally execute code appropriate to each one or disable itself if it has been connected to the wrong target. It also can generate pseudorandom numbers and use them to add variable delay between keystrokes for a more human effect. Perhaps most impressively, it can steal data from a target machine by encoding it in binary format and transmitting it through the signals meant to tell a keyboard when the CapsLock or NumLock LEDs should light up. With this method, an attacker could plug it in for a few seconds, tell someone, "Sorry, I guess that USB drive is broken," and take it back with all their passwords saved.

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