The Washington Post article claims that the risk of “juice jacking” via public USB charging also should be ignored:
Despite warnings from law enforcement and others, it is safe for nearly everyone to use public WiFi or plug your phone into chargers in places such as coffee shops and airports.
Snopes concurs that juice jacking is so rare that the risk should be ignored:
But the warnings are apparently coming from the FBI:
Is there a consensus among the technorati that juice-jacking is also a hoax?
Well, it’s definitely not a hoax. It was demonstrated at the DefCon hacker conference many years ago.
But that having been said, although it is possible, I don’t think it is very common.
But my routine is such that I rarely if ever need to use a public charger. I charge at home and in my car. It’s only when traveling by air or train that I need to charge my phone on the go, and most of the time there’s an AC outlet available. And given the small size of portable chargers (e.g. the little 5W cubes that Apple sells), I consider it a no-brainer to just bring one with me when I’m traveling.
But that having been said, there are occasions where I have no choice. A recent international flight did not have a working AC outlet under my seat, so I used the USB port next to the seat-back video screen. But I consider the odds of a major airline getting its in-flight equipment hacked to be pretty low.
But if this is a concern, you can get a USB data blocker dongle. This will let you charge your phone while blocking all data transfer. If you spend a lot of time charging on-the-go from random/untrusted sources, you might want to get one.
Entirely. I wrote a TCN article about this back in May. There are no documented examples of juice-jacking in the wild, just proof-of-concepts at security conferences.