Bad USB: The Invisible Hardware Threat
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Bad USB attacks exploit the implicit trust operating systems place in USB Human Interface Devices (HIDs) by disguising malicious hardware as a keyboard. Once plugged in, the device injects keystrokes at superhuman speed to open terminals, execute payloads, and establish remote access — all without dropping a file or triggering antivirus. The post walks through building an educational proof-of-concept using an Arduino Leonardo (ATmega32u4), the Arduino IDE, and the open-source Revenant C2 framework, including setting up a Cloudflare tunnel listener, writing the HID keystroke injection sketch in Embedded C, and flashing it to the board. Defenses covered include USB device whitelisting via GPOs, restricting shell access for standard users, and behavioral analytics to detect superhuman typing speeds.
