Shhh….Your Password typing can be heard

This interesting story comes from ZDNet. Hackers are always finding ways to steal your password and hack your PC, bank accounts and what not. Latest research suggests that they may be able to get your password by using $80 worth of equipment to point a laser at a reflective surface near your keyboard from 50 to 100ft away and decoding the vibrations set-off by your keystrokes (Note to self: Time to get rid of that old IBM whitie).

The arrow is pointing to what a stroke on the space bar looks like on a spectrogram.

Here are some quotes from the original article

Presenters at the CanSecWest security conference detailed on Thursday how they can sniff data by analyzing keystroke vibrations using a laser trained on a shiny laptop or through electrical signals coming from a PC connected to a PS/2 keyboard and plugged into a socket.

Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used a handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that’s typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals.

Line-of-sight on the laptop is needed, but it works through a glass window, they said. Using an infrared laser would prevent a victim from knowing they were being spied on.

Read the full article here

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