> There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. I think you're conflating two separat

> There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. I think you're conflating two separate issues. IIRC, I think the exfiltration concerns were more for "in place" chargers at places like airports. There's definitely a separate retail "fake Apple charger" problem, but that has more to do with safety and quality control. It wouldn't make much sense for a retail fake Apple charter to have exfiltration circuitry, because then you run into the problem of how to exfiltrate some rando's data from some random charter. Also I'm guessing that stuff would be expensive. It really only makes sense to me for a thing like that to be a targeted attack (e.g. swap out some research scientist's charger at a conference, and place an exfiltration receiver near his hotel room). > I even have a few "data condoms" leftover from those years. (If you don't remember, they're little dongles you put between your USB cable and the USB charger that only have the power lines connected.) Those are useful for other things. For instance, I have some devices that deactivate and switch to transfer mode when they connect to data, so I use those for charging those devices while I'm still using them. Also, I think they can allow faster charging from a data-enabled port in some cases.