It only takes $ 5 to hack a computer in just one minute

We are living in a time of transition where many analysts and companies bombard us, showing us and making us believe, in some cases, that we live in a world where security, one of the pillars of modern society, seems to be something that we are has promised but what we have never had as individuals, something that becomes clear when we surf the internet day after day, a system that has become the basis for our communications and that seems to be totally insecure.

We have a new proof of what I am trying to tell you in the latest publications made by no less than Samy kamkar. For those who have never heard this name, just tell you that it is nothing less than one of the white hat hacker or ethical hacker most famous of the moment, which has been in charge of developing a device with enough capacity to hack your computer in less than a minute.

With only 5 dollars you will be in disposal of the necessary hardware to hack a computer in less than a minute

Precisely because he is not a hacker to use, that is, a person who looks for any type of defect, bug, back door (whatever we want to call it) to take control of your computer and look for your evil, has decided to make public both its discovery and the way and the methodology with which to proceed to carry out this work, after alerting the companies that own the software that attacks to take control of your computer and that these have their products patched.

As you can read in the title of this same post, we are talking about only an investment of 5 dollars to be able to take control of any computer. How could it be otherwise, for this we need a controller such as the Raspberry Pi Zero. For this to be possible, the famous board must have a malicious program installed that, when connected via USB or Thunderbolt, is capable of emulating an Ethernet device and attacking all the output connections of your computer. Thanks to this, it can trick you into literally hijacking all the internet traffic that passes through it.

This may seem like a small thing, but the important thing about this attack is that, with it, the system can steal all cookies present on the computer when a user uses it to browse pages without HTTPS web encryption. The idea that is pursued afterwards is to expose all the services that you have visited in which, in turn, you have identified yourself at the same time that the internal router of the attacked computer is exposed so that it can be remotely accessible.

In his own words Kamkar:

I, as an attacker, can access the Raspberry Pi and get your cookies and log into the same websites as you would. For this I don't need any password or username.

Thanks to this technique, anyone could spoof your identity in all the sites that you have previously accessed from your computer.

As you can see, it has truly been revealed that with an investment of any $ 5, with minimal knowledge, you can hack a computer in less than a minute, steal all your cookies and web traffic and then, when the time comes, use all this information against you, being able, in the best of evils, to supplant your identity in any type of social network, for example.

Sometimes the truth is that the simplest way is the most effective And, as this ethical hacker shows, sometimes it can be really easy to compromise the privacy of a computer even though it may have password-protected access. I do not want to say goodbye without making my own one of the many warnings that are usually given in talks related to this topic and that is it is not advisable to leave the equipment unattended in a public place, even if it is locked.