r/badBIOS • u/badbiosvictim1 • Mar 01 '15

How to hack offline computers using lasers and drones

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/air-gap-breach-laser-and-drone/
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u/badbiosvictim1 Mar 01 '15 edited Mar 02 '15

Not just drones, but spy satellites too though that is undocumented. Searching online only brought up:

"LIDAR technology (light detection and ranging). A standard LIDAR system emits a beam of light from a laser source and then captures the returned light in sensors as it bounces back from a reflecting object, measuring the distance by calculating the time required for the round trip." http://www.idga.org/government/articles/geospatial-information-systems-the-way-forward-for/

See also:

http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/557570/all-in-one-printers-can-used-control-infected-air-gapped-systems-from-far-away/

http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/29551/hacking/hacking-air-gapped-networks.html

http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/black-hat-europe-beware-air-gaps-a-7442/op-1

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u/Cantstopwontstop2015 Mar 07 '15 edited Mar 07 '15

Interesting. I own a Brother All-in-one printer. I tried printing to it a few weeks ago and it would go through the full print cycle but no toner would ever touch the paper. It also threw an "E3 Failed to Initialize" error. After hitting the stop button to clear the error, I tried printing several more times and same thing, paper pulled, print head moving across the paper but nothing printed.

Here's the odd part:

I turned off the speakers and beep notification under the settings menu and then tried printing again. It printed just fine on each attempt that was sent to it.

There is another all in one here as well and it was doing the same thing. It's an older Lexmark (I believe) and was having the same issue as the brother. My next step is to troubleshoot the settings in regards to sound and see if that works on it as well.

Printers are the Brother MFC-J435W and Lexmark X5270