Beware of Juice Jacking

 

juice jacking – A new way to steal your data

1. Keep your devices fully charged or carry personal charger/power bank with you

This is the most obvious precaution. Make it a practice to charge your phone before you step out. Try and reduce instances of low battery while you are traveling. Charge it full before you step out. Alternatively, always keep your charger and power bank in your bag for charging to maintain control over the data port. You can go longer without needing to tether your phone to a kiosk or wall outlet.

2. Lock Your Phone.

When your phone is locked, I mean truly locked and inaccessible without the input of a PIN or an equivalent pass code, it cannot be paired with any device. Be cautious not to use your face/finger print id for even a second since pairing can happen within a flick of a second. So you have to make sure that the phone is really locked and don’t unlock it while it is in the charging station.

3. Switch off or Power the phone down.

This technique only works on few mobile models as some phones, despite being powered down, still powers on the entire USB circuit and allows access to the flash storage in the device. Hence, this may not be an optimum solution always.

4. Use specialized cables.

You can buy a special USB cable that doesn’t have pinout connections for pins 3 and 2. Therefore it’s impossible to transmit data across the connection. There are companies which make such kind of cables for iPhone, Samsung, HTC, Google, etc. These cables are meant for charging only and prevents data from being transferred anywhere.

5. Use a USB condom.

It is a device that goes between your normal data charging cable and a USB port to block data transfer through the connection. USB condoms are adaptors that allows power transfers but don’t connect the data transfer pins. You can attach them to your charging cable as an “always on” protection.

The best defense against any such attack is awareness. Hope this piece of information may help you safeguard your crucial data. Follow these simple tips, and avoid plugging your mobile into unknown charging stations the same way you avoid opening attachments from unknown senders.