Author Archives: Jack Laidlaw

Hack Your Own Samsung TV With The CIA’s Weeping Angel Exploit

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[Wikileaks] has just published the CIA’s engineering notes for Weeping Angel Samsung TV Exploit. This dump includes information for field agents on how to exploit the Samsung’s F-series TVs, turning them into remotely controlled spy microphones that can send audio back to their HQ.

An attacker needs physical access to exploit the Smart TV, because they need to insert a USB drive and press keys on the remote to update the firmware, so this isn’t something that you’re likely to suffer personally. The exploit works by pretending to turn off the TV when the user puts the TV into standby. …read more

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Hack Your Own Samsung TV With The CIA’s Weeping Angel Exploit

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[Wikileaks] has just published the CIA’s engineering notes for Weeping Angel Samsung TV Exploit. This dump includes information for field agents on how to exploit the Samsung’s F-series TVs, turning them into remotely controlled spy microphones that can send audio back to their HQ.

An attacker needs physical access to exploit the Smart TV, because they need to insert a USB drive and press keys on the remote to update the firmware, so this isn’t something that you’re likely to suffer personally. The exploit works by pretending to turn off the TV when the user puts the TV into standby. …read more

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PogoPlug Hacking: A Step by Step Guide to Owning The Device

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[Films By Kris Hardware] has started quite an interesting YouTube series on hacking and owning a PogoPlug Mobile v4. While this has been done many times in the past, he gives a great step by step tutorial. The series so far is quite impressive, going into great detail on how to gain root access to the device through serial a serial connection.

PogoPlugs are remote-access devices sporting ARM processor running at 800 MHz, which is supported by the Linux Kernel.  The version in question (PogoPlug Mobile v4) have been re-purposed in the past for things like an inexpensive PBX, an …read more

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White-hat Botnet Infects, Then Secures IoT Devices

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[Symantec] Reports Hajime seems to be a white hat worm that spreads over telnet in order to secure IoT devices instead of actually doing anything malicious.

[Brian Benchoff] wrote a great article about the Hajime Worm just as the story broke when first discovered back in October last year. At the time, it looked like the beginnings of a malicious IoT botnet out to cause some DDoS trouble. In a crazy turn of events, it now seems that the worm is actually securing devices affected by another major IoT botnet, dubbed Mirai, which has been launching DDoS attacks. More recently …read more

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Ask Hackaday: Why Did Modular Smart Phones Fail?

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Remember all the talk about modular smart phones? They sounded amazing! instead of upgrading your phone you would just upgrade the parts a bit like a computer but more simplistic. Well it seems modular phones are dead (video, embedded below) even after a lot of major phone manufacturers were jumping on the bandwagon. Even Google got on-board with Google Ara which was subsequently cancelled. LG released the G5 but it didn’t fare too well. The Moto Z from Motorola seemed to suffer from the same lack of interest. The buzz was there when the concept of these modular phones was …read more

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IoT Security is Hard: Here’s What You Need to Know

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Security for anything you connect to the internet is important. Think of these devices as doorways. They either allow access to services or provides services for someone else. Doorways need to be secure — you wouldn’t leave your door unlocked if you lived in the bad part of a busy city, would you? Every internet connection is the bad part of a busy city. The thing is, building hardware that is connected to the internet is the new hotness these days. So let’s walk through the basics you need to know to start thinking security with your projects.

If you …read more

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Half Baked IoT Stove Could Be Used As A Remote Controlled Arson Device

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[Pen Test Partners] have found some really scary vulnerabilities in AGA range cookers. They are connected by SMS by which a mobile app sends an unauthenticated SMS to the AGA to give it commands for instance preheat the oven, You can also just tell your AGA to turn everything on at once.

The problem is with the web interface; it allows an attacker to check if a user’s cell phone is already registered, allowing for a slow but effective enumeration attack. Once the attacker finds a registered device, all they need to do is send an SMS, as messages are …read more

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Prisoners Build DIY Computers and Hack Prison Network

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The Internet is everywhere. The latest anecdotal evidence of this is a story of prison inmates that build their own computer and connected it to the internet. Back in 2015, prisoners at the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio built two computers from discarded parts which they transported 1,100 feet through prison grounds (even passing a security checkpoint) before hiding them in the ceiling of a training room. The information has just been made public after the release of the Inspector General’s report (PDF). This report is fascinating and worth your time to read.

Prisoners managed to access the Ohio Department …read more

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A Touchscreen From 1982, That Could Kill With A Single Finger Press

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Over the pond here in the UK we used to have a TV show called Tomorrow’s World, It was on once a week showing all the tech we would have been using in 10 years time (or so they said). In 1982 they ran with a story about a touch screen computer. Perhaps not what you would recognize today as a touchscreen but given the date and limited technology someone had come up with a novel idea for a touchscreen that worked sort of.

It was a normal CRT screen but around the edges where photodiodes pointing inwards as if …read more

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KFC Winged Aircraft Actually Flys

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[PeterSripol] has made an RC model airplane but instead of using normal wings he decided to try getting it to fly  using some KFC chicken buckets instead. Two KFC buckets in the place of wings were attached to a motor which spins the buckets up to speed. With a little help from the Magnus effect this creates lift.

Many different configurations were tried to get this contraption off the ground. They eventually settled on a dual prop setup, each spinning counter to each other for forward momentum. This helped to negate the gyroscopic effect of the spinning buckets producing the …read more

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