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Fast mobile charging is in fashion and has become one of the most common claims of brands to promote their products. Some even claim that they are capable of charging 100% of the battery in just 15 minutes. However, this constantly developing technology has also caught the attention of hackers, who have found great destructive potential in it .

In this sense, the great threat to mobiles is called BadPower , a virus that is responsible for modifying the operation of fast-charging systems on phones to destroy them .

In essence, this virus ensures that when the phone is plugged into the power supply, it overheats to damage its components, causing them to burn and even causing small fires .

"In most cases, this power overload causes the most important chips in the terminal receiving the charge to break and burn, causing irreversible physical damage ," the company Tencent said in a statement.

"In rare cases," he continues, "attacks with BadPower can also affect the security of the physical environment in the immediate vicinity of the device."

Despite the fact that mobile phones are the most worrying target of this virus - they are more expensive and contain sensitive information - in reality BadPower could act against any electronic equipment that has a fast charging system and a chip .

How to take advantage of fast charging

In essence, the fast charging technology that has been present in smartphones for years reduces the time that a terminal requires to fully charge and, especially, the time it takes to charge the first 50% of the battery . A process that under normal conditions is totally safe but that with the incidence of viruses like BadPower can cause serious damage.

Researchers from the Tencent company say that the fast charging system is one of the processes that receives the least attention in the field of computer security by many manufacturers.

In this way, problems may occur in the verification processes, memory corruption or implementation in the loading protocol. Vulnerabilities that BadPower could take advantage of to enter the terminal, as reported by Europa Press.

"The attacker could take advantage of these problems to rewrite the firmware for the fast charge by controlling the behavior of the power supply, " a Tencent statement warns.

In this way, it would be possible to alter the voltage of the load to very high levels that would end up damaging the mobile phone and burning some of its components .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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