If you’re in he habit of using any Lightning cable you come across to charge your iPhone, take heed. One accessory, the O.MG Lightning cable spy, looks almost exactly like Apple’s official accessory. On the inside, however, it hides all the components someone needs to steal data from your iPhone or Mac.
The Apple Lightning Cable That Isn’t
Last year, the early versions of the O.MG cable made headlines, even though it was pretty obvious that the accessory wasn’t an Apple original. It was offered for sale at Def Con to anybody who could track the developer down. Recently, however, the cable has been greatly improved. Mike Grover, the “MG” in O.MG, told Forbes, “The aesthetics are improved.” His efforts focused on the look and feel of the cable, aiming to make it replicate Apple’s original cord.
He shrunk the board inside the cable by 25 percent, and revised the components to provide it with extra storage space. If you’re wondering what the storage space is for, or why a Lightning cable would even have storage capability, then you’re starting to clue into what makes the O.MG Lightning cable spy so dangerous.
The Lightning Cable for Spies and Hackers
Within this innocuous-looking Lightning cable, there is storage space and an inbuilt wireless controller. It’s able to access your Mac and log your keystrokes, if you plug it into your Mac. The cable is also able to drop malware into your computer, and to attack other connected devices. In one product description, the developers claim the cable is “packed with a web server, 802.11 radio, and way more memory and processing power than the type of cable you would want for just doing demos.”
The storage space is used to hold your malware executables, and wireless triggering allows the cable to act autonomously based on its location. This means if the cable leaves your target’s house or office, it can automatically self-destruct and delete its payload.
How Serious Is the O.MG Threat?
Right now, you’re not liable to run across one of these cables in the U.S. However, Forbes warns that “if you travel to certain parts of the world, frequent hotels and airport lounges (remember those?), work in government service or for a government contractor, negotiate trade or commercial deals, to say nothing of military service, intelligence agencies, law enforcement,” you need to be careful.
With that said, this Lightning cable spy isn’t something you have to know how to navigate the dark web to find. I was able to locate an online merchant selling the O.MG Lightning to USB-A cable, along with similar cousins for USB-C and Micro-USB devices, within less than a minute. The cost of this spy cable has even decreased rom its original $200 price point to just $119.