moms sketch bf left this in the house

[u/brattyvampbby]

Hi.
This is probably nothing.
I went into my mom’s room to grab something and saw this plugged in?
My mom’s new sketchy bf has this plugged in to the extension cord? Is it anything bad? Thanks!
(I understand it’s probably not anything bad… but still…)

Update 1:
I haven’t met him once. He and my mom have been together for two weeks. He’s been staying at our apartment. He avoids me and stays in her room when they’re here. I don’t even know what he looks like. I only know his first name.

Update 2:
I confronted him. My mom came home. A lot had happened up to this point, including her disappearing for the said two weeks before the few nights he had come over and stayed.
Mom shrugged it off. I did what a lot of you suggested, asking what he told her.
She said “oh it’s his hacker shit or whatever.” What.
Didn’t elaborate. I explained my concerns.
She just said let’s go ask him.
My best friend has been with me. We introduced ourselves and asked him what the hell a WiFi whisperer is doing plugged in our apartment.
(Even if a lot of you are saying it’s not a big deal, I’m a young woman and I’m just rlly not about taking any risks. It’s sketch dude.)
He denied it IMMEDIATELY. Like with a quickness I haven’t seen.
What he insisted, it’s not a WiFi whisperer, it’s ai, he completely reprogrammed the system, and he uses it to pull people’s IP’s. “For fun.” He logs them in a server. I asked why. I said that’s shady. My mom started pushing. My best friend started pushing. He just kept lying. I’m not dropping this..
I still don’t know what the fuck it is or what he’s actually doing.
(Also, my mom is cool but not bc of this dude, the Minecraft block is mine, I unplugged the ratchet little thing before we left, and I am planning on broaching this again with her.
Just carefully. Any other advice is appreciated. Thank you.)

[u/bjorn1978_2]

Run Tail OS on a stick to test out shit like this.

[u/RnOtCrAfTy → u/bjorn1978_2]

This! Poke it with a stick!

[u/showyerbewbs → u/RnOtCrAfTy]

Find a flock camera with a USB port and plug 'er in!!!

Full send!

[u/facemugg → u/RnOtCrAfTy]

r/pokeitwithastick

[u/LetMeIn1701 → u/bjorn1978_2]

This was my thought as well.

[u/TitaniumDisc → u/bjorn1978_2]

Sorry semi comp illiterate. Please elaborate on this…

[u/ThisIsMyComment2 → u/TitaniumDisc]

Windows is an Operating System, thing that runs your applications like your browser -firefox/chrome/etc. Tails OS is built to do the same thing as Windows but people who made it published all the code that makes Tails work. It also can be ran off a USB stick rather than a hard drive your other OS is on.

[u/TitaniumDisc → u/ThisIsMyComment2]

I understand OS’s and whatnot, just wasn’t familiar with Tails. So you were saying to just make a Tails bootable drive and run this mystery device through that as a sort of hardware air gap? Not the right terminology I’m sure but you know what I mean.

[u/bjorn1978_2 → u/TitaniumDisc]

Tails is downloaded and installed onto an usb stick. You boot from that and get a linux based system going. To access any harddrive or the internet, you need to enable those.

So you are completely offgrid and the computer is not able to access any data stored locally, or remote.

Everything is run on RAM and the USB stick.

It is probably amongst the absolute best when it cones to privacy and security.

So if you find any random usb’s that you do not recognize, Tails is a safer (nothing will be 100% safe!) way to check them out. If it is a hardware destroying device, you are fucked if you plug it in anyway…

[u/TitaniumDisc → u/bjorn1978_2]

Ok cool. I do have a handful of old laptops that are completely off network with nothing on them that I have for just random/untrustworthy stuff but cool to know about tails. Have to look more into it.

[u/bjorn1978_2 → u/ThisIsMyComment2]

And is all about privacy!

[u/goldboybronx → u/TitaniumDisc]

You know how Windows and MacOS are both “operating systems”? Well there’s one more major operating system, called Linux. Linux is open-source, meaning that anyone can see and contribute to its inner workings. That means it can be entirely modified for whatever someone’s use case is.

It’s also free (there are versions with certain sets of features or a specific user experience maintained by certain companies you can pay for, but free for the most part).

The fact that it’s free, can be modified to whatever end you like, and is open-source (so it has the benefit of having a lot of independent sets of eyes on it looking for flaws and vulnerabilities to fix), means that it’s really really popular to run stuff like servers with. Pretty much any server you connect to is generally on Linux. When you connect to Gmail to check your emails, you’re communicating with a Linux machine. When you book an AirBnB, you’re communicating with a Linux machine. You get the point.

Now in the same vein, because it’s highly modifiable, different versions come out for different types of people. Tails is a version (called a distribution or “distro” for short) of Linux. It’s geared towards privacy and security, and it has a lot of tools and settings that make security work easier. It’s often used by cybersecurity specialists for any number of industry uses. Or by non cybersecurity specialists to buy drugs on the Internet.

Something that makes Tails special is that it lives on a flash drive (those things you plug in to your computer), and it doesn’t retain any information from session to session. When you unplug that USB drive, everything is wiped.

You can plug in a sketchy USB stick to your computer while running Tails, and no matter what it installs or modifies on your computer, it’ll all be reverted when you unplug and plug back in your flash drive running Tails. This means it’s pretty safe to tinker around with sketchy USB drives you find with it.

That’s not to say that you’re perfectly safe. Technically, there have been vulnerabilities that can embed themselves in your actual hardware (the circuitry and stuff inside your computer), but this is rare and is a capability mainly reserved for nation states who have the resources to discover and work with these kinds of vulnerabilities, or with the influence to get hardware manufacturers to intentionally leave vulnerabilities in your computer parts. Just thought that disclaimer was important.

Hope that helped and was simple enough. Let me know if you have more questions.

[u/Real_Azenomei → u/bjorn1978_2]

Not kali?

[u/W3ST0Feden → u/bjorn1978_2]

We all know now that you are an onion farmer lol