Round mouse and keyboard ports?

[StuWar]

Hello
I just received my new PC and was really surprised to see these round mouse and keyboard ports.
I've not seen these for a good 15 years +
Any idea why they are still in use - especially with a new PC.
Thanks

 

[Grumpywurzel]

The ports do seem to crop up on various motherboards, even on the new B550 Asus boards that Linus fitted in his latest video-

 

[StuWar]

Thanks - good to know. I thought I was seeing things.

The motherboard is ASUS® TUF Z390-PLUS GAMING: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs

It's suprising seeing old technology on a new motherboard.

I am surprised if they even make peripherals with those ports any more?

 

[Tony1044]

Hello
I just received my new PC and was really surprised to see these round mouse and keyboard ports.
I've not seen these for a good 15 years +
Any idea why they are still in use - especially with a new PC.
Thanks

View attachment 17397

In high security environments, they are often still used because of things like the Rubber Ducky. This is a USB stick that has the firmware altered so that it's hardware ID makes it appear to the OS as a keyboard. Once plugged in and active, it can then be used to type in commands at a rate of hundreds / thousands of characters a second.

Other such attacks are the exfiltration of keypresses, as an example, so potentially harvesting keystrokes for e.g. usernames and passwords.

It's why in some of the really high security environments, you will often see USB ports physically epoxied over so they cannot have anything attached. This in conjunction with them being disabled in the BIOS.

 

[StuWar]

Thanks Tony1044
That's really interesting to know
Makes sense.
Thankfully - I am not in a high security environment