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Investigating an “evil” RJ45 dongle

Reverse-engineering hardware can be difficult -- but sometimes, all you need is a comfy armchair and some Google Translate.

Earlier this week, a young entrepreneur caused stir on social media by suggesting that an Ethernet-to-USB they purchased from China was preloaded with malware that “evaded virtual machines”, “captured keystrokes”, and “used Russian-language elements”. The poster shared an ambiguous antivirus scan report from Crowdstrike Falcon, but that seemed to be a red herring: the binary was a self-extracting EXE created using 7-Zip, a well-known open-source archiver authored by Ivan Pavlov. But then, with the item in my cart, I had an epiphany: I went to the website of CoreChips and used Google Translate to pinpoint the original Chinese text for the “ SR9900 series chip Windows system mass production tool ”.

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