Though it sounds weird, it’s right, now hackers can really easily spy on you with your “HEADPHONES”.
Now Hackers Can Easily Spy On You With Your Headphones
The increased rapidly growing technology and its possibilities also increase the risk of hacking on them. We’ve seen everything this year, from how you can hack a current account when paying with a credit card at a POS from which how a hacker can find keys and passwords for the keys you press. Even how a drone is pirated in midair. Are there limits on what an expert user can hack? It seems not, since even headphones of the PCs are at risk. Experts from Ben Gurion University in Israel have confirmed that hackers can spy on you via your headphones. Yes, it’s right, now hackers can easily spy on you via your “HEADPHONES”.
Exactly, the question is how you can hack headphones?
And the answer: they can not, but it is pirated itself is the PC to which they are connected. If you use the PC to play, or just to talk through Skype, Hangouts, etc, certainly you have a headset with an integrated microphone cable or Bluetooth, and what a group of researchers has discovered is that those same headphones can be used to record the conversation of the ongoing chat. The research lead of Ben Gurion’s cyber security research labs, Mordechai Guri said that “People don’t think about this privacy vulnerability, Even if you remove your computer’s microphone if you use headphones you can be recorded”.
According to the WIRED reports “It’s no surprise that earbuds can function as microphones in a pinch, as dozens of how-to YouTube videos demonstrate. Just as the speakers in headphones turn electromagnetic signals into sound waves through a membrane’s vibrations, those membranes can also work in reverse, picking up sound vibrations and converting them back to electromagnetic signals”. The experts from Ben Gurion University in Israel have been experienced with the RealTek codecs, it is an audio technology implemented in most market base plates, and experts have discovered that you can create a malware attack directly to the ‘Retasking’ function, the same that allows the board to reconfigure its audio jacks that support different types of peripherals and sound systems as the user needs to use. Hence, the security researchers say that the “RealTek chips are so common that the attack works on practically any desktop computer, whether it runs Windows or MacOS, and most laptops, too”. In this way, a hacker can gain remote control of a PC and through the attacker can make changes to the audio output of the headphone’s microphone.
