Like, these are actually well respected cybersecurity professionals who are consistently invited onto mainstream TV to talk about cybersecurity.
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Like, these are actually well respected cybersecurity professionals who are consistently invited onto mainstream TV to talk about cybersecurity.
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Marcus Hutchins :verified:replied to Marcus Hutchins :verified: last edited by
"Question is: Did they intercept the supply chain and just hand them a bunch of IEDs or did they use mind control to reverse the flux capacitor on their fridge, leading to an outbreak of ebola"
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The Frogreplied to Marcus Hutchins :verified: last edited by
So it's BS then?
I mean, is it possible to hack into an electronic device to make the battery blow up? If it is, I *will* freak out.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to The Frog last edited by [email protected]
@Lily_and_frog It depends. In the first approximation, on how much of the low-level energy flow control is left accessible to the software, and how much is hardcoded, but there's caveats.
=> Some devices have lithium battery charge control circuits that can be rigged to make the lithium battery go fiery by software. These devices are currently rare. The share of these devices will rise over time, however, because there's advantages to exposing battery charge to software control — at the risk of also allowing software to shortcut the battery. That having been said, a lot of battery packs have protective circuits against such, just in case.
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@riley @Lily_and_frog @malwaretech Also that's "rapidly being on fire" not "rapidly disassembling the device into a single direction" so it wouldn't yield the results of this attack. It'd be more like the cheap Chinese "hoverboards" and less cheap Samsung phones that caught fire a few years ago.
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@ln Most of the danger of most of lithium batteries, right now, is focused on them starting to burn while on a plane, in a compartment assumed to not contain any burning things.
But high capacity lithium batteries can also put out a lot of burning.
I haven't seen the videos yet, but considering that we're talking about pager batteries and explosions that can, according to an AP report, tear off a person's hand, I'm pretty sure that the amount of energy unleashed in this case is significantly larger than what fits into a lithium battery.