Just when you thought stopping smoking cigarettes and moving to e-cigarettes was the healthy option, they get dangerous too. A recent report has revealed a man's computer was hacked by an e-cigarette when he plugged it in to charge.

The e-cigarette, bought on eBay from China, connects via USB to charge. An executive at "a large corporation" suffered from the infection according to a post on Reddit. Despite the computer system being patched up to date with security software and anti-malware it was still infected.

The e-cigarette, when plugged in, "phoned home" and infected the system. The IT department couldn't find the cause of the infection until they asked the computer's owner if anything had changed in his life to which he responded, "Well yes, I quite smoking two weeks ago and switched to e-cigarettes."

Whether this was a random act or some sort of international hack that has something to do with the countries or businesses involved wasn't clear. Also what the infection actually did wasn't detailed.

While this is probably fairly isolated we'd recommend charging your e-cigarettes from a wall socket in the future just to be safe.

Pierluigi Paganini, chief information security officer at ID management firm Bit4Id says: "Hackers are able to exploit any electronic device" to serve malware – so be wary of what you plug into your machine in future.

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