Juice jacking, USB condoms, and phone security while traveling

The latest news coming from air travel security experts involves convenient USB charging stations spread around airports. While your first thought may be that you never use the USB charging station because a crowd of people always beats you to it, there’s a legitimate security risk associated with using them: “juice jacking.”

Truthfully, this type of hack has been around for years. It’s just not something known by most of the general public. Basically, an attacker can subtly modify the port to house malware that will penetrate your phone once you connect it to a port with a USB cable. The malware will affect your phone performance—more importantly, it can steal texts, emails, photos, and other data you don’t want to give out to strangers.

This doesn’t happen only at airports. Syncing your phone to a rental car’s USB port provides all sorts of access to your data. Hotel lobbies and coffee shops might set up charging stations for customers’ convenience, but think of all the people passing through, and how these places are easy pickings for data mining.