Is that like some hacking lingo?
In: 3
https://hak5.org/products/usb-rubber-ducky?variant=39874478932081
It’s a script that installs into this kind of USB dongle, and injects keystrokes into any computer it’s plugged into at an incredibly fast rate.
So a hacker can quickly execute pre-written attacks without having to manually type everything in. It’s a way to automate the hack and do it in such a way that won’t draw attention.
Sticking this in and just standing there is not as obvious as sitting down and typing into the computer for 5 minutes.
A “rubber ducky” is a thumb drive that has been hacked so that it tells the computer that it’s a keyboard rather than a thumb drive. Then, as a “keyboard”, it will open a command prompt or browser window and start typing malicious commands.
The others are likely the answer you want, but to go a bit more into the etymology, the prevalence of rubber ducks in hacker culture can be at least partly attributed to a practice called “rubber duck debugging” which is one of my favorite bits of info, so I’m going to share it for a minute.
When a program doesn’t behave like it is supposed to, you go into debugging – one of many techniques for debugging is simply describing in sufficient detail what the code is doing, versus what it is designed to do – that can be done with a co-worker or friend by talking to them about the problem, but in a busy environment (or for lonely coders), explaining to a stand-in is often sufficient (as sometimes just the act of explaining the problem leads to the solution)
For times like these, some programmers took to keeping an actual rubber ducky (that is, the bath toy shaped like a duck made of rubber, not the malicious thumb drive) at their desks, and explaining badly-behaving bits of code to it so that they could get the duck’s infinite wisdom on the topic to then fix the bug they were encountering (if it wasn’t overly obvious, this is very tongue-in-cheek) – since this became somewhat standard practice, rubber ducks have shown up in various hacker- and programmer-related things.
To understand this, understand a few facts and put them together.
1. A bad computer program like a virus is an actual software program. Your computer knows that programs can be viruses, so yoru computer doesn’t let a virus just install and run without checking it to see if its bad, and asking you (the computer user) “do you really want to install this?”
2. Instead of installing a bad program, I COULD just manually do the bad stuff to your computer from the key board. (example > open command window > turn off virus protection > open connection to evil computer > etc
3. But I can’t actually get on your keyboard and manually start typing commands to do bad stuff because… its not my computer. If I walk up to your computer and start typing on your keyboard, you’d be like “hey hey you wth are you doing??”
4. Now the rubber ducky comes in. The rubber ducky is just a USB drive that your computer sees like a USB keyboard. A keyboard isn’t a program, its a piece of hardware, so most of the time your computer just trusts it. I’m a computer. Why wouldn’t I accept input from a keyboard???
5. So you (the bad guy hacker) just has to type out all the bad commands. (this is the “SCRIPT”). Then all those commands, the script, get saved onto the USB keyboard ducky thing.
6. The someone plugs the USB ducky into another computer, (because they think its just a USB), the USB ducky replays all the keystroke commands from the script. It just spits all those keystrokes into someones computer.
The end result is the same thing as letting a bad guy sit at your keyboard and type in the bad stuff.
Thanks everyone, with your help now im more scared then before I knew. 🤟
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