Hackers Can Now Hack Into Your Password Protected PC In 30 Seconds With A $5 Device

Hardware hacker -Samy Kamkar created a small device which costs $5 which comes loaded with devious code to completely pwn your password-protected computer and install remotely accessible back doors. Even your well protected PC with strong password can be hacked in 30 seconds by the hacker armed with this device. All an attacker need is to plug the nasty device in the target computer and wait.

How Does It Work?

Dubbed PoisonTap (the new exploit tool) runs freely available software on a tiny $5/£4 Raspberry Pi Zero microcomputer, which is attached to a USB adapter.

Once plugged into a Windows or Mac computer via USB port the device starts impersonating a new ethernet connection. Even if the user’s PC is connected to a WiFi network, PoisonTap is programmed in such a way that tricks the computer into prioritizing its network connection to PoisonTap over the user’s WiFi network.

With that man-in-the-middle position, PoisonTap intercepts all unencrypted all Web traffic and steals any HTTP authentication cookies used to log into private accounts as well as sessions for the Alexa top 1 Million sites from the user’s browser and then sends that data to a server controlled by the attacker.

Kamkar points out that his tool can also bypass several other security mechanisms which includes same-origin policy (SOP), X-Frame-Options HTTP response headers, HttpOnly cookies, DNS pinning, as well as cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).
However there is no easy fix to this, though you can avoid such attacks by closing your browser every time you walk away from your machine and also disabling USB ports is also effective, though it’s impractical too.

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