This 'Killer USB' can make your Computer explode ~ DepoTech

Can Hackers turn a remote computer into a bomb and explode it to kill someone, just like they do in hacker movies? Wait, wait! Before answering that, Let me tell you an interesting story about Killer USB drive:

It seems the scene of a Sci-Fi movie, anyway it is an interesting topic to explore.

Let’s read together the story about Killer USB drive:

A man walking in the subway stole a USB flash drive from the outer pocket of someone else's bag. The pendrive had "128" written on it. After coming home, he inserted the pendrive into his laptop and instead discovering any useful data, he burnt half of his laptop down. The man then took out the USB pendrive, replaced the text "128" with "129" and put it in the outer pocket of his bag… Amen!

Starting from the story a Russian researcher, nicknamed Dark Purple, developed a proof-of-concept computer-frying Killer USB pendrive.

Dark Purple works for a company that develops and manufactures electronic components, the researchers together with his colleagues decided to create a USB flash drive which a specific purpose, it “would burn half a laptop down.”
Cool!

The researcher decided to design the Killer USB, a USB flash drive that could be exploited to burn a PC or at least kill its USB port, then, he ordered some circuit boards from China

While any electrical port on a computer is a great entry point for potentially hazardous signals, USB is pretty well protected. If you short power and ground together, the port simply shuts off. Pass through a few kV of static electricity and TVS diodes safely shunt the power. Feed in an RF signal and the inline filtering beads dissipate most of the energy.

To get around or break through these protections, [Dark Purple]’s design uses an inverting DC-DC converter. The converter takes power from the USB port to charge a capacitor bank up to -110VDC. After the caps are charged, the converter shuts down and a transistor shunts the capacitor voltage to the data pins of the port. Once the caps are discharged, the supply fires back up and the cycle repeats until the computer is fried (typically as long as bus voltage is present). The combination of high voltage and high current is enough to defeat the small TVS diodes on the bus lines and successfully fry some sensitive components—and often the CPU. USB is typically integrated with the CPU in most modern laptops, which makes this attack very effective.