For the devices that stayed alive but had their ports dead (Especially the macbooks), giving them a restart would be a good idea because sometimes, computers turn off the port entirely when it notices something abnormal, and it turns it back on after a restart. Had experience with having ports screwing up on me like that, definitly my fault but, often times a restart solved it.
It's the battery replace it along with the port you plugged it in those devices will be repaired plug that to a regular PC without the CMOS battery your safe 😂
Count me in for an autopsy & repair video as well. I suspect some of the ports may come back to life due to thermal fuses resetting, but for e.g. the MacBook M2 I imagine the controller chip for charging got its guts blown out, as that's a common issue with 3rd-party chargers as well. The Switch probably has the charger chip destroyed as well, which just makes you wonder why they don't all have voltage clamp circuitry on the USB lines. The Z-Flip 3 clearly does, while the iPhone only seems to do fuses.
PS5 will definitely be dead, I've watched a lot of people who try to fix them with broken USB port's and if you're unlucky to cross VCC with the Data + or Data - pins. The data lines run STRAIGHT into the APU
@@lukedavis436 That's Apple HV-next-to-CPU-signal-lines levels of bad... yeah, in that case there's probably no way that the PS5 will come back without a full APU swap, which means that it's at most a spare parts system.
My Samsung Galaxy Note 5 survived a lightning strike that hit the house. The strike fried an entire circuit in the wall, the outlet on that circuit my phone charger was plugged into, the charger plugged into the Surge Protector, the cable connecting the charger to my phone, but my phone was unscathed. Other things that didn't survive that strike include: The circuit breaker for that circuit in the breaker box, the surge protector powering my PC, a toaster, the in-sink garbage disposal unit, several lamps and lightbulbs that were turned on at the time, and my step-father's iPhone 5 issued to him by the company he works for as well as the lightning charger it was plugged into. I told my step-father that it was ironic that the lighting charger couldn't handle the lightning when my Note 5 was just fine, however, so I was rooting for the Z Flip 3 to win.
Newer Macbooks have a protective function where if an issue is detected when charging it will disable charging until the device is restarted. I'm not saying that the M2 Mac for sure survived with no damage but interested if it still wasn't charging after a restart of the system.
There are dozens of videos that demonstrate just how much Austin loves the Z Flip but this might be the ultimate example. You could hear the concern in his voice, see it in his face, and you could see the sheer joy when it survived
Should it have been though? Isn't it like the newest product there? MBA M2 was 2022, Switch 2017, PS5 2020, Iphone SE 2022, and I don't know about the other stuff. I was surprised by the charger though, it should have had some kind of surge protection ability I would think. Or maybe the USB port of such devices just weren't shielded like that, unlike a phone, which would have those kinds of protections since it's also a charge port. Which is why the phones survived. Well the iphone SE not as much, but still.
@@bobbyflaydx4062 since USB-C can also provide charging, it can be connected to same circuit as MagSafe for power delivery, so USB Killer load would spread there killing "just" charging capability which we see as "USB-C and MagSafe break". Also, Austin is wrong at the end when trying keyboard saying "there's no data either" - you don't know if there's no data, as there's no power (due to breakage) to power the dongle and said keyboard.
If I'm not wrong the USB killer charges the capacitors inside it up to 220V then sends all that voltage through the data lines on the port. It can fry whatever uses the data lines, those being the RAM, CPU, GPU, SSD and other parts that require data lines.
Someone at my school had something like these once, they snuck it into school and plugged it into peoples laptops. I got back at my MacBook Pro (2015) had shut down which I found weird, but it powered back up and even accepted a charge!
Rebooting the laptops where just the port died may fix them. I know windows will disable a port if it detects problems before it causes permanent damage.
For the brandnew MB, you might have tried power-cycling it first before declaring that the USB-Cs are no longer accepting a charge. That way you could have found out if only a breaker triggered or a fuse outright blew.
for people interrested: The USB Killer that austin used, as well as the older versions work by charging up the capacitors using the 5 Volt supplied through the power pins of the usb and then discharging their charge through the Data pins (tho i think the newer ones actually does both) which, most of the times, are less shielded against such an attack than the power pins. Reason why they data pins are most times less shielded is because it is harder to build said shielding for said pins since most inexpensive shielding methods will effect the signal in some way or another which, as you may have guessed, is not a good thing to have on data lines (data loss may be imminent) .
Also with the data recovery, newer apple cpu macbooks are easily prone to death of their ports. If one goes, they all go. They all go through the same IC for charging. I'd love to try to attempt repairing one of these
if the hackers can send signal to the usb killer itself think of the damage it can make happen all the hackers can do is give them a usb that like theirs and plug it in and fry their servers the problem with allowing usb killers to become connected to phone can make them hidden to IT support that never hear of them and think is theirs own usb sicks
I think a follow up video would be a good idea, partly to see the damage, but to also see if the damage could be something as simple as a blown fuse somewhere, or if you managed to totally fry something.
Electricity is scary, yo. Few years back I had my laptop hardlined into my router during a thunderstorm. Lightning hit my apartment building, went through my CAT5 and fried my entire motherboard. I wouldn't be surprised if thats what happening here.
@UnjustifiedRecs Ik but this is my first time seeing something in action but this instantly breaking someone’s device which costs hundreds but the actual usb costs about £100
The moment you said the Switch I knew it was done for. Nintendo recommends their own AC Adaptors not for sales increase but because, if you get the wrong charger without a particular resistor installed can fry the charge port. A power shunt like that isn't even going to blink while it blows it.
I would not recommend people buy the USB killer. I got one in 2016-2017 and I've only touched it a handful of times. There are very few reasons and opportunities you're gonna come up with to fry the motherboard of a computer with the USB killer. Maybe you'll do it once or twice, at school, on an old PC, whatever. But after that you'll basically never touch it, and any reason why you might will get you in big trouble. Computers are expensive so you'll quickly reach $1,000 worth of broken electronics, which is a felony. Even without the legal trouble, you'll be hard pressed to find a reason to break it out after it's novelty wears off. Very cool device to have on a shelf though, I'm still happy I bought one.
try an SMC reset on the mac's and see if that fixes the issue. Mac automatically shuts off the ports if it detects anything. you have to manually reset them.
Wonder if rebooting that MacBook would've changed anything. I have an M1 MacBook 16 that got splashed with water. The ports on the left would not work, but after a restart, they were fine.
There was actually an individual going around my college campus specifically targeting Mac laptops. He destroyed over 30 laptops and was never caught. He/she probably used one of these.
Immpretry sure manually doing it will always FORCE a charge that will do something to the electronics but it seems so far one device won't allow it to auto function which is nice
Apple and asus have protections in place , older iPads (8th generation and lower ) , iPhone (8 , and lower all se editions ) are all acceptable to usb kill 4, PlayStation 5 1200 and slim also has upgraded protection. Some other models have it just to kill the port
The way the macbook died is scariest. No indication that anything is wrong. You come back to your computer and keep working without issue. But go to charge it and nothing.
Yeah, but with Katie connect you get nearly flawless video and photo transfer with whatever Wi-Fi you have with a pretty decent speed and you get wireless charging that might not support your 20 W that your iPhone wants but it can handle up to 15 W at least in my experience
Some electronics have a small component like a resistor that acts as a sacrificial lamb when things like these happen. Just replace the component that is fried on the board.
As a person who worked for a company that made us buy our own work laptop, and wanted us to buy the ridiculous Dell rugged with a 3rd gen i5 from them, I'm so happy to see that overweight brick go down.
Being able to charge and deploy that power makes it finally useful for me. If I have an old piece of technology that died on me, now I could absolutely fry it and make sure I don't have any data leaked. It's a lot easier than pulling the HDD out. I did a test, and if you go to the tip and buy a couple of adaptors, and some old trash computers (hard drives are better, as they have less encryption, but most of the time they are properly dead), you will get a surprising amount of info. I actually sent some of it back to it's original owners, including some precious pictures they thought they had lost!
I once got one of these and used it on a plethora of school computers. It somehow didn't work on all, but I got a good chunk of them. I also hated this one guy( who liked me for some reason) and when he told me he got a new laptop, I handed it to him and told him a crap ton of emulators ang games were on it and he could transfer everything over if he waned. He hasn't spoken to me since and smashed it with a hammer.
As good as it is to say manufacturers should defend against this attack, I'm just not sure that's feasible to a certain extent. There will always be a high enough voltage to bridge protections momentarily. Plus, if someone has physical access to your device, most security can be bypassed anyway.
You should have tried the “USB killer” thing on the USB dongle while it was plugged in the computer to see if the dongle would take the damage or just pass it through the computer
USB shielding and grounding likely has nothing to do with this at all. That device is most likely back feeding all that stored energy onto the 5V rail and destroying the buck converter used to derive it from the main system power. surge might drive the 5V buck converter output high enough that it pop's the regulator's internal switch and is able to back feed to the regulator input and onto the rest of the system rails. if that logic is correct, there's no real good way of protecting against this that would not have other downsides for normal operation
Shielding and grounding will do jack, since it dumps the payload down the power and data lines. Fuses are probably the best defence, although its sending down a massive voltage not current, so fuses won't work either.
Probably fried the usb controller or pch/cpu. Its a high enough voltage that it can easily destruct transistors of a few nanometer and probably jump over multiple transistors to other lines and other chips. You can see how esd can kill things and how overvolting for example a cpu can cause electromigration
Latent damage could also be a killer in the long term. I would definitely look at the components on the board after something like this happens. It may even cripple processors after a long time of use after the event.
