On Tue, 9 Feb 2021 11:14:09 +1300, Matthew Skiffington wrote:
If anyone wants to view a catalogue of this sort of thing, there is a litany of inventive manipulation posted over at /r/assholedesign, entertaining and disheartening in equal measure.
Just had a look at that, and found a link to this article <https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/flashing-booby-trapped-cisco-ap-with-openwrt-the-hard-way/> about how Cisco brought out a firmware update for their Meraki MR33 wi-fi access point, back in 2018 <https://github.com/riptidewave93/LEDE-MR33/issues/13#issuecomment-449849255>, with an interesting booby-trap in it: it detects an attempt to install a third-party open-source OS, and permanently bricks the device. However, some intrepid hacker figured out a workaround, sometime last year. This involves removing the Flash RAM chip, reprogramming it with an older, non-booby-trapped bootloader, and reattaching it -- not a procedure for the faint of heart ...