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Cheap Device to Stop Juice Jacking

December 3, 2019

The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office created quite a stir when it publicized a warning about juice jacking. If you don't know, juice jacking is essentially the act of sucking data off of your device when you plug into a USB charging port. More and more establishments are installing USB charging stations to satisfy our insatiable need to keep the batteries charged in our mobile devices. Many hotel chains are even upgrading rooms with USB charging ports in night stands and desks. While it is technically possible to have rogue USB ports compromising your data, there haven't been any reported incidents of juice jacking in the real world.

My advice has always been to use the charging block (plug it into an electrical outlet) instead of using a USB charging port. If that is not possible, there are devices specifically designed to block data transfers. One device highlighted in a ZDNet blog post is the PortaPow 3rd-gen USB data blocker. It is currently out of stock at Amazon, but is scheduled to be available on December 9, 2019. You may be called paranoid, but seven bucks can buy you piece of mind.

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