The O.MG Cable: A Hacker's Weapon in Plain Sight
O.MG cables are used by Cybersecurity Red Teams, enthusiasts, coders, and students to emulate attacks on mobile phones.
Cybersecurity Red Teams are white-hat hackers that will attack an organization’s network in order to identify weaknesses and potential entry points.
On the other hand, Blue Teams are security professionals responsible for maintaining internal network defenses against cyber attacks and threats.
The Blue Teams should be able to identify and prevent the attacks from the Red Team and, by doing so, prove that the organization's network is safe from internal or external hacking attempts.
But, an O.MG cable looks like an ordinary charging cable. And, this makes it a dangerous tool.
Still, once connected to a mobile device with WiFi capabilities, the O.MG cable can be used by black hat hackers to access information or deploy malicious programs.
Learn About the O.MG Cable Features
The more you know, the better you will be prepared to avoid hacks and scams.
So, the more you know about the O.MG cable the better you will prepared to avoid bad actors using one of them to hack your devices.
An extract from the information made available by the Hak5 Team on their O.MG cable product webpage:
- Easy WiFi Control: Full control with your web browser. Desktop or mobile
- Keystroke Injection: Instant DuckyScrip payloads. No compiling, just click run!
- Lots of Payload Slots: The basic model comes with 8 slots. Elite has extra storage allowing up to 200 slots!
- Global Keymaps: With 192 keymaps already built-in, you can target machines across the world.
- Built-in IDE: The WebUI not only provides 100% of the controls but also gives you helpful feedback to catch syntax errors while building payloads.
- Mobile Payloads: Cables with USB-C active end, or Directional C to C, can automatically transmit to mobile devices with USB-C connectors. Connect just the active end!
- Stealth: The implant stays dormant until the payload is deployed. The cable behaves just like a normal USB 2.0 cable (5V charging, 480 mps data transfer)
- Hardware keylogger: Elite models contain a passive hardware keylogger designed for FullSpeed USB keyboards with detachable cables. Store up to 650,000 keystrokes, For tested keyboards ...
- Convert Exfil: Send data from the host back to O.MG cable over a convert channel.
- Air Gap Coms: Setup a bidirectional tunnel from Target Host > O.MG > Control machine
- Networked C2: Manage your O.MG cables with network attached C2 server
- Self-Destruct: Make your legal team happy by ensuring payloads & loot are gone, and the O.MG cable is fully inert (recoverable with O.MG Programmer)
- Geo-Fenscing: Trigger payloads or other actions based on location. Keep your tool from falling out of scope! Ex: self-destruct if someone takes the O.MG cable home.
- WiFi Triggers: Trigger payloads at long range with a single beacon.
Now, you don't need to know what a 'Convert Exfill' or a 'Networked C2' are, but after reading about the O.MG features it must be relatively clear that this cable/device has powerful capabilities and in the hands of a bad actor can be used to 'easily' hack your phone, tablet or mobile device.
Think Twice Before Borrowing a Cable From a Stranger... or Get Hacked
An O.MG cable is not precisely cheap. At the moment of writing this article, one O.MG cable does cost approximately 180 USD.
If a bad actor wants to use a cable to hack into your device, this person is not just going to buy a bunch of cables and leave them lying around.
The chances for success, or finding a suitable target, are extremely low and not worth the investment: Would you spend thousands of USD buying several cables just to leave them around with a possibility lower than 1% of finding a suitable target?
This approach would be just a big waste of money and time...
But, there are some ideal situations that a bad actor may use. For example:
- A casual friend, who in reality is a bad actor, may loan you the cable for a short period of time. So you can power your mobile phone in case of an emergency. If you are a casual traveler or a backpacker, think twice before using a cable that someone 'kindly' has loaned to you for a short period.
- If you are a well-known crypto user, who has made the crypto portfolio public, you may be the target of a well-planned attack to get hold of your crypto assets. In this case, an individual or a group will be willing to give you an O.MG cable or swap your existing cable, because you are a valuable target. And, for the hackers, the probability of success and high reward is quite probable.
- And, who knows, maybe you come across a charging station that kindly provides power and all sorts of cables so you can power up your mobile device. How nice of them and how handy...
How to Identify an O.MG Cable
Some bad news here... visually it is not possible...
While in the past was relatively easy to identify an O.MG cable, with the newer hardware versions this is not possible anymore.
If interested, have a look at the images made available by Adam Baldwin in his 'Identify an O.MG Cable' article.
This is one example picture taken from his article, where he shows how a previous model O.MG cable looked like:
How to Protect Your Devices from an O.MG Cable
Given that visually identifying an O.MG cable is mostly not possible: You should NEVER use cables from untrusted sources.
But, if you think that given your profile you could be the target of a hack through an O.MG cable, for example, a cable swap while you are not vigilant, you should take additional steps to protect yourself.
Like purchasing the countermeasure provided by Hak5.
But, if you cannot or don't want to buy specific hardware to detect O.MG intrusions, you can always consider protecting your most valuable accounts using a hardware token as 2FA or MFA authentication method.
Digital Safety and Security Knowledge and Good Practices will keep you protected from most if not all, hacks and scams.
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Please be aware of the following before making any comments or making up your mind about the Hak5 community.
The Hak5 community promotes security research and discourages malicious usage of their product, as described on their community page.
In the spirit of fostering a healthy community focused on the kinds of security research that make for a better digital world, please keep in mind that contributions promoting illicit activities will not be condoned. We respect each security researcher's moral compass and disclosure beliefs, however, we reserve the right to remove any post that we deem unethical. This may include black-hat language, offensive speech, destructive payloads, malware, or exclusively malicious creations.
White Hat Hackers, and to some extent Grey Hat Hackers as well, do not mean any harm.
It is the Black Hat Hackers who work for their sole benefit and to the detriment of other people. Those are the types of hackers that we should be concerned about.
Those Black Hat Hackers will use common computers, software, or specialized tools like the O.MG cable to do harm.
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Congratulations on completing this 5-minute digital safety power-up.
We hope this short article has helped increase your digital safety knowledge and awareness, and the 5 minutes read was worth the time.
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Article originally published at: https://www.publish0x.com/@Crypto-Safety-First
