Are your using a computer that is audio-enabled? It might be enough to get it hacked easily, as per recent findings from German researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing including Ergonomics. As it was found in a paper for the Journal of Communications and the researchers have hacked computers using nothing but only a sound.
In these days it has been quite advance in technological side that will enable the present security systems to be more competent. Before you start worrying about your own computer, take a second to have sympathy for anyone you know in the computer security industries. Recent most secured computers in the world are presently isolated from other machines — which is protected by “air gaps,” with no Internet connection, no shared telephone lines, nothing. Basically it comes to us that such computers are impossible to hack unless the hacker has direct & physical access to the same machine. At least it was the conventional wisdom prior to the recent German discovery.
The Fraunhofer researchers now started researching audio hacks after considering that how malicious hackers might break into these highly secure systems and computers. They have done a long term research on the issue and made different sort of tests. As they mentioned in paper that hackers often used “parts of the operating system that were not considered for communication” in recent days to insert malicious data into otherwise highly secure systems.
They adopted the approach of a hacker when designing a sound-only hack for getting data from deliberately isolated computers. Audible noises could be used to pass data between such computers and the “hacker” PC/Laptop, but the researchers, wishing to remain as ordinary as hackers, instead of choosing to use sounds at a frequency inaudible to human ears (similar type of noise coming out from dog whistles).
The researchers have not even tried to develop a system to hack the recent upgraded computer system but also make people aware about newly coming hacking techniques that should be stopped through anti-theft technique. Building upon preexisting technology used to transmit data under water by sound waves, they were able to use the microphone and speakers in an Lenovo T400 personal computer to transmit small amounts of information — some keystrokes in the trial case, though the hack could also transmit encryption keys, some text files and passwords also- from an segregated computer to a compromised one.
They also tested the range of audio hacking, and found that on another un-modified computers, this method worked for distances up to 65 feet – a classic range which can be expanded almost indefinitely with use of special “mesh networks,” that can wirelessly transmitting audio long distances.
So, how we can end it up here? Followed by the study, “audible/ sound based networking as a covert communications technology is a considerable threat for PC security.” Now a days the modern highly-secured computers that require audio, the researchers suggested sound-filtering as a way to block covert acoustical attacks as the technique. So, why not please make your machine’s audio just disable for others.
