Mike Ritland

speaker

855 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Feb 2025

Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Shawn Ryan Show · #164 Mike Grover - How Hacking Tools Are Changing Cyber Warfare · 29 Jan 2025 podcast

Uh-huh, so you're watching that. And then, pop, the drive blows up, confetti goes everywhere. And I'm like, yeah, that was cool. I just viewed that as fun.

Another type of art or something like that. Put it out on the internet and it was like, that's crazy. A lot of people asked me to sell that. Now, no, that's a terrible idea for so many reasons, liability, et cetera. Um, When you put something into the world that can be used negatively, it's always worth gaming out. Like, how bad can it go and can you prevent some of it?

Which I've done a lot with the cable. But in this case, it was just something I wanted to put out there. But at that point, I had a really tiny ducky, right, that I could – Maybe I could put it in other things. And eventually I got the idea, probably like doing my IT job, looking on Amazon for spare parts for hardware and stuff. I noticed there were like USB cable repair ends and boots.

I'm like, wait, what? You can just get those? You know, at the time I didn't know much about manufacturing, right? Got some of those and realized there was enough space in them for the cables and this really tiny, you know, fake ducky, right? Shove it in there and I get the very first proof of concept of a malicious USB cable. Yeah, put that out.

And, you know, I already told the story about that one where, you know, it gets out there and a lot of people like it and a lot of people wanted it. I think almost a year goes by before I'm like, you know what? I could make that way better. Like, that was a toy. Like, this is like a cool gimmick to show like a very basic prank. Barely even worked for that. What would a proper tool look like? Yeah.

I was getting way more into the concept of I want to do red teaming as well, so I'm combining those things. And yeah, I was like, okay, I need Wi-Fi, I need remote control to update payloads after it's already in play. Because the idea is you can either deploy a cable, like physically get in sight, or... you could just leave it in somebody's bag, just leave it around.

And eventually, you know, people are going to take a cable sometimes and they'll bring it in with them to the secure space. Like, cool, I didn't have to even go in. Great. which creates some interesting legal problems, which we can get into that I've also solved. But yeah, that kind of is just how it kept evolving. And then at that point, it's like, okay, this is a real tool.

At the time, I was thinking I should do this in a way that I just make it open source and everyone could make their own. Are we still talking about the USB? Yeah, USB cable.

And that's, I thought about that, right? Like I was prototyping this cable, this new one, like on a desktop mill for cutting PCBs, right? Like I was pushing the limits on this machine where you can mill a PCB. So the PCB, actually, I got a little problem with this. So a PCB, like here's a complete product. This is a Raspberry Pi, right? When I say PCB, I'm talking about just the green part here.

That's just, it's basically a fiberglass and epoxy with a thin layer of copper on it that gets turned into traces and that connects all of these components. The black thing there, that's a component. And all the little things you see on there, they're soldered on. That's components with copper traces connecting them together electrically. So I used a mill to kind of cut out the copper traces.

And I would assemble in my garage lots of different test versions of what this cable could look like. And I got the idea, kind of going back to the defense distributed concept, where, oh, open source is this. People can make it on a desktop mill, go that direction. What I learned over the 12 months of revising and revising is it's really hard to do this. Like, DIY was just not in the cards.

Nobody was going to be able to do this. I'm like, okay, well, let's throw out the DIY. I can just turn up the complexity. There's PCBs

with two layers like copper on each side right that's the common one those are i can make those in my garage but okay what if i want eight layers or something like that that like that gets really expensive we're talking every time i want to do a run of an eight layer pcb six layer pcb is a minimum of thousand dollars okay like i i have to send that off to a factory they're using lasers and all kinds of crazy x-ray inspection stuff to do this so i'm like okay if i can use that

How far can I go? And that kind of is how I evolved into making a more and more and more complex cable that is like the latest generation OMG cable. It does all of these different things. And yeah.

The exploding USB?

The OMG cable?

Yeah, I just, OMG cable.

Oh yeah, so I guess I just kind of call it like early prototype tests. I was referring to it kind of at the time as like bad USB cable, which is not an accurate description. It was more of a nod to some research at the time that was called bad USB cable. That's where you would take an actual thumb drive.

There's a few old, old thumb drives that you could take and reprogram the controller on it and actually do keystroke injection, among many other things. It was also a worm that would replicate to other thumb drives you would plug in. Cool concept, bud.

OMG cable, definitely.

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