Stay Away From The Rubber Ducky

In this day and age, attacking computers using physical devices has, contrary to popular belief, followed a linear growth in the field of penetration testing. Back in the day when Windows 95 introduced the 'autorun' feature, hackers began to use it as a means of installing malicious software on their victims PCs. Today, the auto-run feature has been disabled, however, we still have various means of executing applications automatically.



One of the more popular ways of doing this, is to emulate a keyboard using a Teensy board. However, lately the Rubber Ducky has gotten some attention, so I decided to buy a few to test them out.

Suffice to say that it is not what has been advertised. It functions merely as a prank device rather than a part of a penetration testing toolkit. A poorly made scripting language, lack of support and limited functionality reduces the device to a useless, but pretty laptop ornament for the wealthy hacker. I would recommend everyone to buy the Teensy board, as the Teensy is way more powerful, cheaper, more stable and has a ton of features, compared to the cash cow that the Hak5 team calls 'Rubber Ducky'.

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