Investigating an "evil" RJ45 dongle

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

What happened to U3 at the top left in the image of the flash chip?

Looks like they had a footprint for a diode in a 3-pin SOT23 package and found they didn't have stock of the special part, so they installed a SOD323 diode at a 30 degree angle across two pins...