You can watch Aaron’s full SteelCon talk here: 📌 youtube.com/watch?v=hwog0eWw…

A couple of weeks ago, @thackeraaron was at @Steel_Con talking about a piece of hardware most people probably wouldn’t give a second thought. An unbranded £10 4G USB modem. The slightly odd part is that some of these devices come with 512MB of memory. Once Aaron started pulling them apart, he found that many were effectively headless Android phones hiding inside a USB stick. His talk looked at how they can be rooted, reflashed, and loaded with custom firmware. With some work, an ordinary looking modem could be made to inject keystrokes, exfiltrate data, or carry command and control traffic. And, because “Can it run DOOM?” wasn’t enough, Aaron reflashed one of the modems to run the game, then made it present itself to the host computer as a webcam. Open the camera feed and, instead of anything remotely useful, you get DOOM! Entirely necessary research, obviously. #SteelCon #HardwareHacking #CyberSecurity