The FBI advised consumers to avoid using public charging stations due to malware risks last Thursday.
A tweet from the FBI’s Denver office last week explained that fraudsters had learned to infiltrate citizens’ private devices by uploading malware to them via public USB charging ports located in airports, malls, and hotels.
To avoid becoming a victim, the post recommended: “[carrying] your own charger and USB cord and [using] an electrical outlet instead.”
The practice is known as “juice jacking.” It came to public attention in 2011 when researchers from Aires Security developed a tainted charging station at the hacking convention Def Con to showcase the potential threat.
It requires less than 10 seconds for malware to access your browser history, Ritesh Chugh, an associate professor of information and communication technologies at Central Queensland University, told The Washington Post.
This makes juice jacking a “significant privacy hazard [since] as little as one minute of charging time may be adequate for compromising a user’s phone,” Chugh explained.
In 2021, public advisories about juice jacking were issued by the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission, with the latter also mentioning reports of infected power cords being given away in promotional offers.
Yet there don’t appear to have been many reported instances of malware theft through juice jacking. FBI officials told Axios that the latest announcement simply aimed to remind the public about the issue.
Nonetheless, the damage that a successful attack could inflict on a person cannot be overstated.
Hackers could gain complete access to an individual’s phone, including his or her credit card information. Subsequently, such data could be sold to other fraudsters.
As The Dallas Express recently reported, a crime syndicate in New York City was recently able to use stolen identity data to order duplicates of 3,000 driver’s licenses from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
In the case of one victim who spoke anonymously with NBC News, fraudsters racked up approximately $50,000 in charges on her accounts and opened dozens of credit cards.
If you are left with no other choice but to use a public USB charging port, it is recommended to monitor your phone afterward to see whether its settings change or it starts overheating, per The Guardian.
Demonstrating well the accelerating technological skills of fraudsters, credit card skimming is also on the rise, as The Dallas Express reported earlier this year. Skimmers use a Bluetooth signal that can capture information from 30 to 100 cards a day.