What’s the deal with that supposed 30TB external SSD being sold for just $31.40 on China-based online shopping site AliExpress? It’s also listed on Walmart’s website for just $39 — but first, listen to cybersecurity researcher calling himself “Ray [REDACTED]”.
Scammer gets two 512MB Flash drives. Or 1 gigabyte, or whatever. They then add hacked firmware that makes it misreport its size… when you go to WRITE a big file, hacked firmware simply writes all new data on top of old data, while keeping directory (with false info) intact.
Ars Technica goes over the details:
On the inside, this “SSD” looks like two small-capacity microSD cards hot glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board’s firmware has been modified so that each of these cards reports its capacity as “15.0TB” to the operating system, for a total of 30TB, even though the actual capacity of the cards is much lower…. It preserves