Black Hat USA 2025 | Weaponization of Cellular Based IoT Technology

As IoT devices continue to integrate cellular technologies for communication, the potential risk for adversaries to weaponize the hardware's trust relationship and gain access to critical backend infrastructure grows exponentially. During this talk, we will present our research focused on how built-in cellular technology in IoT devices can be leveraged to gain access to and execute attacks against cloud services and backend private network environments. We will cover methods to modify IoT devices to take control over the installed cellular modules, allowing for injecting communications and establishing Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) traffic between the Micro Controller Units (MCU) and the cellular modules. We will demonstrate how control of onboard cellular communications could be used to launch attacks against the backend cloud infrastructure and network systems outside of the IoT device's intended purpose. During this presentation, we will demo and release proof-of-concept code to control the onboard cellular modules to accomplish these goals. We will also discuss techniques that manufacturers can leverage to reduce or mitigate the risk and impact of these attacks. By: Deral Heiland | Principal Security Research (IoT), Rapid7 Carlota Bindner | Lead Product Security Researcher, Thermo Fisher Scientific Presentation Materials Available at: https://ift.tt/lvK8S4p

source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eadubgujxGc