Your wireless keyboard is giving up your secrets -- literally.
With an antenna and wireless dongle worth a few bucks, and a few lines of Python code, a hacker can passively and covertly record everything you type on your wireless keyboard from hundreds of feet away. Usernames, passwords, credit card data, your manuscript or company's balance sheet -- whatever you're working on at the time.
It's an attack that can't be easily prevented, and one that almost nobody thought of -- except the security researchers who found it.
Security firm Bastille calls it "KeySniffer," a set of vulnerabilities in common, low-cost wireless keyboards that can allow a hacker to eavesdrop from a distance.
Here's how it works: a number of wireless keyboards use proprietary and largely unsecured and untested radio protocols to connect to a computer -- unlike Bluetooth, a known wireless standard that's been tried and tested over the years. These keyboards are always transmitting, making it easy to find and listen in from afar with the right equipment. But because these keystrokes aren't encrypted, a hacker can read anything on a person's display, and directly type on a victim's computer.
The attack is so easy to carry out that almost anyone can do it -- from petty thieves to state-actors...
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