Diabolic Parasite Is a Neat New Wi-Fi-Enabled Keystroke Injector and Keylogger

Pentesting is cool, because it provides all of the fun and challenge of hacking, without any of those pesky ethical concerns. But as sophisticated as some attacks can be, the most effective attacks are often the tried-and-true methods that have been around for decades… just with some updates. That’s why you may be interested in the Diabolic Parasite Wi-Fi-enabled keystroke injector and keylogger.

Keystroke injection and keylogging are positively ancient attacks. Keystroke injection works by automatically typing out a series of keystrokes to perform some activity, like opening a shell and uploading an important file to a remote server. Keylogging is essentially the opposite and works by recording everything the user types, including passwords and sensitive data.

But as effective as those are, their basic forms are detectable by software. Security software can, for example, detect keystroke injection by looking at a change in USB HID identifiers or very consistent typing speed.

Diabolic Parasite is a tiny ESP32-S3-based device that bypasses most means of detection. It spoofs the connected keyboard’s identifiers so it is indistinguishable from that keyboard, it varies keystroke timing, and it even automatically switches to a passthrough mode if someone connects a USB device that isn’t an HID, such as a thumb drive. And because it has built-in Wi-Fi, users can pull or inject data without ever physically retrieving the device.

It also has other nifty features, like self-destruction and mouse jiggling.

Diabolic Parasite previously launched through a crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply. But if you missed out on that, you can now buy a Diabolic Parasite device on Crowd Supply for $115 plus shipping.