Stop your typing and find yourself a quill pen and inkwell. Your keyboard is no longer secure. Is anything secure anymore? No wonder Bin Laden went low tech to escape capture.
Swiss researchers have developed a way to record keystrokes by spotting the electromagnetic radiation emitted when keys on a keyboard are pressed. Hold on. Did we say radiation? Don’t worry, not the bad kind. Reportedly, the researchers were surreptitiously capturing keystrokes using a radio antenna at a distance of up to 20 meters away from the keyboard. They tested a variety of different keyboards with the same success. The attacks even worked on laptop keyboards, not just on PS/2 and USB keyboards. The scary part is that the researchers believe their attack methods can be improved. Promise or threat???
Clearly, this technology could assist criminals in stealing personal and confidential information such as passwords, social security numbers and other information inputted by a user without detection. Gee, do you think they’ll figure that out quickly?
And it’s painful to think of how proprietary data could leak this way. Business espionage would have a field day.
How can you prevent this? Maybe a new wave of “secure keyboards” will hit the market. Maybe the keyboard will be replaced all together by a touch screen, like those on smartphones. Maybe you can crowd your desk with electromagnetic radiation emitting devices, like a stack of monitors, and bask in the glow of radiation, because they can’t get you now.
We’re betting the mortgage that you’ll see keyboard sniffing on CSI shortly.
- John and Mike
(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com
