Who’s Watching You Type?

By Guy Bunker | October 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Guy Bunker

While we have known for a while that keyboards were a great place to snoop for information, it now seems that they are more vulnerable than previously expected. Research from Switzerland has shown it is possible to snoop keystrokes from 20m away just by monitoring the slight changes in electromagnetic radiation each time a key is pressed.

Tests were done with a variety of keyboards and all were found to be susceptible to the attack.

As with all research, this just points the way to what is possible and therefore what will become reality out there in cyber-criminal land. And so a new attack vector is born… one where you don’t have to infect the target’s machine with malware, or a piece of additional hardware (one of the easiest ways to install a virtually undetectable keylogger – who looks for additional widgets on their desktop keyboard connectors?!?!)… you just have to get to within 20m, and it doesn’t even have to be direct line of sight – the method works through walls as well.

What to do? Perhaps it is time to start using ‘virtual’ keyboards for username and password input – as standard.

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