[tronje]

It sounds weird that they're selling key-logging sticks for $50 and spoofing routers for $100 at a convention where you'd think everyone can build that stuff by themselves for a much lower price.

Just to add to your point, I suppose.

[busterarm]

At a convention you can pay cash (semi-)anonymously where if you had to build that stuff you'd leave a paper trail.

Many I know in this group of people (DefCon/HOPE attendees) do things like trade around craigslist-cash-purchased laptops.

[dublinben]

It would also be a good place to anonymously buy Bitcoin for cash.

[mseebach]

> everyone can build that stuff by themselves for a much lower price

At volume. But if you only need one (or ten), assuming your time has some non-trivial value, it's much cheaper to just buy off the shelf.

[pmorici]

Even if you value your time as worthless then maybe you could build a hardware key logger for less than $50 in parts but I really doubt it.

[riskable]

There's no need to "build" anything for this purpose. Just buy a general-purpose microcontroller like this:

http://www.freetronics.com.au/products/leostick

...and stick it inside a generic keyboard (which has plenty of room).

I always thought that the fact that big corporations hand out the same keyboard to everyone enables these sorts of attacks. Any would-be spy could just make a handful of hardware key-logging generic HP and Dell keyboards and easily swap out any given keyboard at any given big company without having to even think.

I never use my employer's provided mouse/keyboard combo. Mostly because they're always absolute crap but also because I want to give any potential attackers a hard time. I can only imagine the look on some attacker's face when they show up at my desk and see custom hardware everywhere =)

[Vexs]

You can buy them from china really cheaply for a couple bucks.

[marcosdumay]

I'm sure a lot of people there has better projects to spend their time on than rebuilding commodity hardware.