Would it be possible to have something that looks like a thumbdrive but literally just shorts out the computer or would one of those things need to be bigger? 🤔

I'm not worried about viruses. I have nothing sensitive to steal stored on my machine or anything worth saving so I can always wipe the drive. But I would be wary if simply plugging a thing in could fry my PC.

[–] __hetz@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 weeks ago

I was overdue for a reminder about this site. In the same spirit "USB Killers" are indeed a thing. One I saw, a while back on Hackaday, was basically a bunch of small surface mount capacitors on a board stuffed in a generic thumb-drive type case.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

USB killers are a thing. The top three autocomplete for USB killer were ...buy, ...eBay, and ...Amazon

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_killer

Paper on their effectiveness on different hardware: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/137908/1/WRAP-killing-your-device-via-USB-port-Angelopoulou-2020.pdf

These are moderately easy to make and cheap to buy

The first two returns from Google were sites selling USB killers