Five Dollar Cyber Weapons and How to Use Them

Kody Kinzie opens by framing the talk as an introduction to offensive work on low-cost microcontrollers, many of which now cost less than five dollars. He contrasts them with single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi, whose prices have climbed, and explains the skills needed for each route: flashing community firmware through a browser, copying CircuitPython onto a board as a USB drive, or compiling Arduino code for finer control.

The middle of the talk moves through specific boards and projects. The ATtiny85 and ATmega32u4 cover keystroke injection and mouse jiggling, with a warning that the cheapest boards are unreliable across different computers. The Raspberry Pi Pico runs Ducky-style scripts. The ESP8266 is the centrepiece because older firmware allows raw Wi-Fi packet injection, which powers the Deauther project. Demonstrations include deauthentication, rogue access points, a phishing page posing as a router update, probing for networks stored on phones, spoofing assisted GPS locations, signal-strength presence detection, drone-based searching of a park, and NAT routing. The ESP32 adds packet capture, and the ESP32-S2 brings native USB and CircuitPython, although newer Espressif chips restrict packet injection.

The closing section covers the USB Nugget and a deliberately vulnerable web login app for practising with proxy tools, then previews newer boards such as the ESP32-C5 and C6. The takeaway is that meaningful attacks are within reach for a few dollars and that formal computer science training is not required to start, though hardware quality can vary between suppliers.