Charging your cell phone on a public USB port, whether in a train station, a shopping center or in an airport, is a harmless gesture… which can put you at risk.
People who have a cell phone and use it on a daily basis are undoubtedly familiar with this problem. After a night of charging, your smartphone’s battery is at 100%, then in just a few hours, the level surprisingly drops to 40%, or even much lower. A slightly annoying situation, especially when you need to use your phone to work, to make an urgent call, to follow your GPS directions, or even to have your train tickets saved on a mobile application scanned. So, to avoid finding themselves without a battery, some people have gotten into the habit of carrying a phone charger in their bag. A good reflex, you would say, unless you use the free charging stations which are almost everywhere now.
Whether in stations, airports, shopping centers, hotels or trains, more and more public places are equipped with charging points with freely accessible USB ports, so that users can plug in their phones and load it. A gesture that seems harmless at first glance and yet it exposes you to a risk. Indeed, you can be the victim of what is called juice jacking, that is to say a cyberattack. Concretely, hackers hijack USB ports to install malware on terminals, with the aim of hacking your phone and stealing your personal data.
A phenomenon observed a few months ago in the United States by the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) and which could be present in France. Questioned on the subject by the magazine 60 million consumersJean-Jacques Latour, head of cybersecurity expertise on the Cybermaveillance.gouv.fr site warns: “This threat is very difficult to spot and quantify.” If you have connected to one of these terminals, a sign should alert you. “if after connecting your phone to a public charging station, a window appears to install or update software (…) This may, in fact, be an attempted digital break-in”, specifies the expert.
In any case, it is better not to plug into this type of terminal, or in which case, you must use a USB data blocker, which is added to the USB port of your charger and which protects you. They are easily found on specialized merchant sites for less than 10 euros.