There is a lot of debate regarding e-cigarettes and whether or not it is actually good for your health. Naturally advocates of the e-cigarette claim that it isn’t harmful and helps people quit smoking, while some health experts beg to differ, but that is just a debate for another time. Today we are talking about the dangers of e-cigarettes…and how malware can actually get inside of them.
Now for the most part, e-cigarettes can be charged via USB (some use rechargeable AA batteries) either plugged into a wall socket or to a computer, like you would a phone or tablet. However it is precisely because of this USB connectivity which has allowed some very creative hackers to embed malware inside of them.
According to a recent post on Reddit, one user claims that there was a security breach at the company they are working at. The executive was found to have malware installed on his PC and while they could not initially determine where the malware had come from, it was later revealed that his recent switch to e-cigarettes was where the malware had originated from.
It seems that the malware had been hard coded into the charger and when plugged into a computer’s USB, that’s when it installed itself and infected the system. Of course we can’t be 100% sure that this is a true event, but given that there are malware out there like BadUSB that can do something similar, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.