janoc - Slashdot User

Submission + - FTDI driver breaks hw again. (eevblog.com)

Submitted by janoc on Sunday January 31, 2016 @12:11PM

janoc writes: It seems that the infamous FTDI driver that got famous by intentionally bricking counterfeit chips has got a new update that injects garbage data ("NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND!") into the serial data. This was apparently going on for a while, but only now is the driver being pushed as an automatic update through Windows Update, thus many more people stand to be affected by this.

Let's hope that nobody dies in an industrial accident when a tech connects their cheap USB-to-serial cable to a piece of machinery and the controller misinterprets the garbage data.

Submission + - FTDI is intentionally bricking devices using competitors' chips. (hackaday.com)

Submitted by janoc on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @01:44PM

janoc writes: It seems that FTDI has started an outright war on cloners of their popular USB bridge chips. At first the clones stopped working with the official drivers and now they are being intentionally bricked, rendering the device useless. The problem? These chips are incredibly popular and used in many consumer products. Are you sure yours doesn't contain a counterfeit one before you plug it in? What are you going to do if your device gets trashed?

The article is on Hackaday: http://hackaday.com/2014/10/22...

Submission + - Intentional backdoor in consumer routers found (synacktiv.com)

Submitted by janoc on Monday April 21, 2014 @07:29PM

janoc writes: Eloi Vanderbeken from Synacktiv has identified an intentional backdoor in a module by Sercomm used by major router manufacturers (Cisco, Linksys, Netgear ...). The backdoor was ostensibly fixed — by obfuscating it and making it harder to access.

The original report is here (pdf)

And yeah, there is an exploit available ...

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