How to Make an Auto Hacking USB Drive
When it comes to computer security, sometimes it’s good to know what it is that your trying to protect yourself from so in this video, I’m going to cover the auto-run feature in Windows and why for security reasons you should never use it and to prove my point, I’m going to show you how to make a USB drive that exploits the auto-run feature to automatically download in saving user’s information just by putting it into a USB port.
To do this project, you’re going to need a U3 USB drive such as a SanDisk cruiser and access to Windows XP machine. What makes a U3 USB drive unique is that it emulates a CD-ROM drive so that it can auto-run its launch pad whenever you plug it into a computer. This is useful because Windows will not allow programs to auto-run straight from a USB drive but it will allow programs to auto-run from CD drives and since a U3 USB drive shows up as both, we can use this feature to auto-run our USB drive.
The first step is to back-up everything that is currently on your USB drive then go to this website and download the universal customizer program. This program is going to allow you to replace the U3 launch pad application with your own customized auto-launching application. Unfortunately, this program only works on the Windows XP so you have to have an XP machine in order to run this. When it’s through downloading, extract all the files to the desktop and then open up the U3 custom folder. This folder is where we are going to create our custom auto-launching program.
The first thing that we want to do is create an auto-run file so right click within the folder and select new text document. Rename it as auto-run.inf and then double-click on it to open it up. Type [auto-run] and then type open = launch.exc -A. The, click file, save. These will auto-run a program called launch.exc that we’re going to make right now. So again, right click on the folder and select new text document and this time rename it to launch.bat then, right click on it and select edit.
Now type /USB.vbs. Save it and close it. This will tell it to open up a file called USB.vbs that it will create in a second. But first, we need to convert this batch file to an executable that Windows can auto-run so go to this website and download the bat to exc converter. Open it up and run the exc file. For the batch file field, point to the launch.bat file that you’ve created then click compile and you should now see a launch.exc file in your U3 custom folder.
Now let’s create the USB.vbs file. Create another new text document and rename it to USB.vbs then right click on it and select edit. You want to type in this code which you can find the full copy of in my form. Basically, what this script does is scan the computer for a USB drive and then executes a file called batch.bat from that USB drive. Once you have that done, click save and exit. We can now burn this to our U3 drive. So go back up to the main universal customizer director and then click ISO create.cmd. This will turn our folder into an ISO file that we can then put on our USB drive.
Now, click on universal customizer.exc. Just follow the instructions in the program and it will set-up your U3 drive to run our custom-created launcher. When it’s through, click done, you’ll need to pull out your USB drive and plug it back in and it may give you an air but here’s how you can fix that.
First, you need to find some programs to put on your drive. You can find some good programs at nearsoft.net that are good for retrieving passwords and information like that. I’m going to go to password tools and download the password fox program to retrieve Firefox passwords. You can download any programs that you want but just make sure that they are compatible with whatever system that you’re going to be using it on. Just extract the files and copy them to your USB drive.
Lastly, we need to create a batch file that runs the program silently and stores the data that it collects back on the USB drive. So right click on the USB drive folder and create a new text file and rename it batch.bat. Then, right click on it and select edit. To launch the program, type Start and then the name of the program. For me it’s going to be passwordfox.exc and according to the nearsoft website that we downloaded it from, if you want to save it as an HTML file, we can type \shtml firefox.html. Now, to make sure that it reads it and saves it to the USB drive, we need to put % - dp0 before both filenames. Now, save it and test it out. Just take it out and put it in a computer that has auto-run enabled and within seconds you should have an HTML file that’s saved to the USB drive with that user’s information.
Some things to note about this program is that it only works on computers that have auto-run enabled and it will not work if another USB drive is already plugged into that computer. If you want even more protection from scripts that can be run from bearers to BIOS there’s this free trial program that you can download called endpoint security that you can find in this website. Just download it and install it to the computer and it should automatically launch. Then, click start .click add computers to this policy and add your computer’s IP address. Now, you can blacklist specific devices from being used on your computer or you can just block certain programs by clicking on filtered-type control. When you’re through, hit CTRL D and then click OK. After the action has been deployed, you should now get this message if something tries to run that’s in the filter list.
If you have any more software suggestions or tips, feel free to leave the in the comments below. Also, be sure to check out tinkernut.com on Facebook and Twitter. Alright, that’s it for this tutorial. For more, go to tinkernut.com.
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