Mike Ritland

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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

So here's the thing. I was making a lot of these things for personal use, but I would also kind of sell it to friends and stuff. It's kind of like the back alleys of DEF CON type situation. I wasn't advertising this, but it's like, if you know me, I know you, I'll give you some of these things. But it became clear I had to start scaling up.

Like, the first batch of prototype OMG cables, I think it was 2019, I brought as many as I could. They took me... It was like 8 or 16 hours per cable, and 50% of them were failures, which is terrible. When you make something like an electronic product, usually you get like 95%, 99% yields, which means 1% to 5% are failures that you throw away.

These things were so hard to self-assemble that I was throwing away 50% of what I made. Wow. So that automatically doubles the amount of time invested to make a cable. So I'm doing like 16-ish hours per cable to make them. Wow.

Silly. So, yeah, I was kind of hitting my limit of like what I could accomplish with the time I had. And it's like, you know what? I need to learn how to, like, delegate this outsource manufacturing assembly. Because I was also doing this, like, hand-placing things. You go to an assembler. So, there's a couple steps here.

So, I'm going to run you through, basically, the manufacturing pipeline that I slowly learned is important here. But first, Hack 5. It's really important to mention Hack 5 here. So, USB rubber ducky, already mentioned. You know, that's That's Darren, Darren Kitchen, his phone number. He, you know, that was his baby invented about 15 years ago.

He's got so many other things like the LAN turtle, the Wi-Fi pineapple, just packets for us.

They're similar to the ANCAP, right? What's the LAN turtle? Exactly, right? So all of these are different kind of like hardware implants or hardware tools for... They're multipurpose, but often used for offensive security. So like the land turtle is like a network implant that can control a computer, but also like sniff up network data or just do malicious network stuff. What else?

Wi-Fi pineapple. This is a little box with antennas on it that allows you to do network attacks, right? Really cool stuff. Network what? Network-based. So Wi-Fi attacks. Like you can break into Wi-Fi. You can... They call them like man in the middle concept. I like to refer to it as mischief in the middle.

But basically, you know, you've got your device here and like the wireless access point here, right? They're talking. But you bring in a Wi-Fi pineapple and it can kind of intercept in between. There's so many different ways you can do this. There's no one single way. It's lots of Wi-Fi based tooling. Another example, it's not so much relevant these days, but

You know, when you connect to like your free Wi-Fi access points, coffee shops and stuff, your phone remembers that. Typically, you've told it to remember that usually. So next time you arrange, it's going to automatically connect, right? The Wi-Fi pineapple, for instance, can say, guess what? I'm that Wi-Fi too.

So if I pull up one right here and put it next to you or just anywhere, your phone's going to be like, oh, I know that one. Let me connect to it. So that type of stuff, there's just so many different attacks that I couldn't possibly run through all of them. But just as an example, there's so many different approaches to security.

We think about computers and plug-in USB in, but yeah, there's other things. There's the network, there's the wireless, there's near-field communication with badges and things like that. Totally different tools, totally different specialties and focuses. The badge readers you don't think of as computer security for the most part. It's just building access, right?

but that's all one whole thing interesting you're doing proper complete security awareness and testing well let's take a quick break yeah when we come back i want to get into what is the actual omg cable oh yeah good point perfect

OMG cable, right? Looks exactly like one of the many USB cables you've got. And if it doesn't, I got a whole bunch more hair to guarantee it does.

Yeah, I mean, think about all the different, and it's, think of it as camouflage, basically. It's like, what's the environment? Do they use white cables? Do they use USB-A, USB-C? Is it a Mac shop? Cool, they're going to have lightning on one end, maybe, if they got the older phones, if it's, Newer phones, cool, and USB-C. And it's really about blending in to fit what's already in place.

So you could swap it out or you can do other things. There's a lot of different... and techniques you can have when you have a device that is physically invisible and just hiding in plain sight. So that's the physical aspect of it. And that took me a huge amount of time of shrinking down the components, which I will describe in just a second.

But shrinking it down, it just took absurd amounts of time just designing the PCB that goes in here. And then beyond that, just the entire process of integrating the PCB into a cable. That just took... like a year, basically.

Yeah, exactly. So, the PCB inside of here, what it does is when you plug it into a... It's primarily targeting laptops and desktops. Um... It's got a PCB that will wirelessly kind of light up and it'll connect back to you. There's so many different ways you can configure it, but this wireless connection allows remote connection into the cable, get a full web UI in your web browser, right?

Whether it's on your phone or laptop. It can even connect out to the internet, and you can connect to this thing from anywhere on earth if you do it that way. What's it do, though? You've got to control this wirelessly.

No. You've still got to have a wireless network it can connect to, or you bring one in. Okay. If I open my phone right now and looked at all the wireless networks, I bet there's probably one in there I could connect to. If not, are you going to notice a free coffee shop Wi-Fi nearby? No. Why not? For instance, right? Flexibility is the name of the game with this. There's no one way to use it.

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