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Would you buy a dongle that destroys your USB ports?

By Salehuddin Bin Husin - on 9 Nov 2015, 1:35pm

Would you buy a dongle that destroys your USB ports?

Introducing the USB Killer, a dongle that destroys USB ports.

We've heard of computers being damaged by recklessly inserting connectors and other methods, but all of them are usually accidents. The USB Killer dongle, which kills any USB port it's attached to, is something you purposefully do.

The logic behind the creation of the device, as zany as it may be, is surprisingly sound. The USB Killer is to prevent unauthorized access and copying on your computer. In the scenario the creators provided, your house is being robbed and the data on your PC is at risk. To safeguard the thieves from transferring the data over to their USB devices and also to stop them from examining the contents of any USB drive might you have lying around the house, you use the USB Killer to disable all the ports on the machine.

It's a bit of a stretch to envision a scenario where you'd rather cripple your PC than have your data stolen (unless you have nuclear launch codes or something), but desperate times do call for desperate measures, we guess.

Of course, seeing as how the device just needs to be plugged in to work, we think it'll be used for more malicious things than securing information.

Luckily, any damage the USB Killer does to a machine is repairable. Or at least that's what the creators of the USB Killers claim. They don't mention what damage the dongle does, so we really have no idea what you'll need to do to get your USB port working again. In a logical world, it'd just destroy all the USB drivers on your PC, so that it won't detect any USB port, but it looks like the the device physically damages your hardware, which is why there's also a disclaimer saying it might affect the motherboard.

If the potential damage doesn't deter you, you can help fund the device on Indiegogo right now. The USB Killer dongle comes with the US$99 tier, though with only 15 days to go and the project only having 12% of its US$10,000 target, it looks like the project might not get funded after all.

Source: Indiegogo (via Engadget)

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