The USB Killer is a booby trap designed to look like an ordinary USB drive, hand-made USB drive that will "burn down" your laptop if you insert it into your USB slot.The “USB Killer” device was created by a do-it-yourself hardware enthusiast who described his project, complete with pictures and technical details, on a Russian blogging platform in February.
The creator of USB Killer, who uses the online alias Dark Purple, claims to work for a company that manufactures electronics and said that he ordered the custom printed circuit board and other components he needed for the project from China.
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A description by the Russian creator was recently translated into English for the enjoyment of the devious and the mischievous here in the States. Essentially, the innards of this thing can gather enough voltage to fry the insides of your computer with high-voltage pulses.
"I tested the idea and 'burnt down' everything I could," the translation reads. "Then, I developed and ordered printed circuit boards in China and made a combat model."
You can get more details about the build here. According to Gizmodo, some readers are already keen to buy one of these devices, presumably to play horrible pranks. Thankfully, the write-up doesn't give all the details on how to make one, nor does it indicate that the creator has any interest in selling the creation.
The USB thumb drive uses an inverting DC-to-DC converter to draw power from the computer’s USB port in order to charge a capacitor bank to -110 Volts. The power is then sent back into the USB interface via a transistor and the process is repeated in a loop.
The loop runs till everything possible is broken down. Those familiar with the electronics have already guessed why we use negative voltage here. I‘ll explain to others that negative voltage is easier to commutate, as we need the N-channel field resistor, which, unlike the P-channel one, can have larger current for the same dimensions.
