To be fair, anything can be hacked if you solder some shady circuitry on your ports.
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Security Researcher Develops Lightning Cable That Gives Hackers a Way to Remotely Infiltrate Your Computer
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To recap: if you plug hacking hardware into your computer, you can be hacked. Overall, not a big surprise, but it also seems like a valuable exploit. I wonder if the iPhone can also be hacked with this technique, or if it's because the Mac is still less locked down.
I'm more surprised people still connect their iPhones to their Macs. I don't think I've done that since I no longer required iTunes to activate a new iPhone.
don't know where this USB-A thing is going to be plugged in, but if it's anything from Apple nowadays then there's at least 1+ dongles in the chain. Will it still work then?
The people who make the cables say if there's an open wifi access point in the vicinity of the cable then it can join it to make the range effectively limitless.
Down the road somewhere, this will end up with the computer asking, "do you trust... you?"
Points, but the counter is, obtain a small personalized rubber stamp, and use it with ink that only shows under UV light to apply your own undetectable mark, then carry a tiny UV light with you.
This kind of stuff is actually quite common. You can basically take a off the shelf microcontroller like and Arduino and have it pretend to be a USB/Keyboard and mouse. If your interested in this stuff search up the Rubber Ducky and Bad USB as a good starting point.
Basically what they did here was streamline this tech and hid it into a cable, and threw some wireless networking in the mix. I'm not really too surprised here, this seems like a pretty natural progression from handing someone a USB flash drive to now handing people cables.
Basically what they did here was streamline this tech and hid it into a cable, and threw some wireless networking in the mix. I'm not really too surprised here, this seems like a pretty natural progression from handing someone a USB flash drive to now handing people cables.
This is why I use a USB condom. Passes power without data and is ribbed for her pleasure. 
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Uh, what private standard are you talking about? This is using standard USB.
You mean an unsecured WiFi access point. How would it know the password for your WiFi?
Dangerous stuff. But this gives Apple an idea of what they’re looking at in terms of how something can be infiltrated through a lightning cable, hopefully they can figure out something with their suppliers to make sure this doesn’t come to fruition where this could spread into the masses where a users info could be compromised.
$200 is expensive if you don't have a clear target. If these cables could be produced for only a few dollars each, then they could sell millions on Amazon to unsuspecting users. That would turn into a real problem for many users without targeting any single user which is the definition of a massive data breach.
Clever hack! Probably nothing new to government counterintelligence experts. This would make for a fun subplot in a spy movie, where someone sneakily replaces someone else’s cable.
That logic is flawed. The right logic is that somebody hacked an Apple cable, therefore somebody can just as easily hack an Anker cable because they are fundamentally identical.
The points are that people can hack Anker cables easier because the connector housings are slightly bigger than Apple's, some of the connectors are two-piece and easier to separate, and the supply chain of getting Anker cables from the factory to you is not as tight as Apple's (e.g. involving third-party Amazon sellers).
I know this is fake news cause my co-workers just told me last week that Macs are immune to viruses and hacks.
How is this even a public service announcement? A security researcher develops a cable that can be used to infiltrate your system... all for what purpose... what is his personal motivation for developing a cable and then telling everyone that it exists? This whole exercise seems very self serving... like he was just needing to get his name mentioned...
Any cable that pass data in addition to power has this vulnerability. Do we really know what is on the other end of a USB port at that coffee shop, hotel room, or airport charging station.
This attack adds the wireless component, which could be potentially added to any power and data cable (Lightning, USB A, USB C, ...)
This attack adds the wireless component, which could be potentially added to any power and data cable (Lightning, USB A, USB C, ...)