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Investigating an "evil" RJ45 dongle

(lcamtuf.substack.com)
289 points zdw | 1 comments | 17 Jan 25 20:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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MartijnBraam ◴[17 Jan 25 22:13 UTC] No.42743835[source]▶
I came across the tweet about this "Evil" dongle and instantly recognized it as the exact same thing I worked on before... It's not evil, it's just annoying.

https://blog.brixit.nl/making-a-usb-ethernet-adapter-work-sr...

In my case I disabled the SPI flash module to have it not appear as a CD drive, the author of this post actually found some documentation about the SPI being optional. Funnily enough this post now also gives you all the tooling to make an actual evil RJ45 dongle by reflashing one :D

replies(2): >>42744057 #>>42744435 #
stavros ◴[17 Jan 25 22:45 UTC] No.42744057[source]▶
Hm, why does shorting CS and S0 make it not work?
replies(2): >>42744156 #>>42744266 #
1. MartijnBraam ◴[17 Jan 25 23:18 UTC] No.42744266[source]▶
Shorting almost any two of the communication lines of the flash chip will corrupt the communication enough that the ethernet controller thinks there's no flash installed at all.