Hacker Can Capture Your Data Through Smartphones While you are working on your laptop

By Prempal Singh 0 Comment August 22, 2019  cyberattack, how to capture sound of keyboard, keyboard sound capture, sound capture, sound hacking

Having good features and functionality of a smartphone, it sounds good but sometimes it can be used as a weapon for hackers. Attackers can now silently steal your data and private information while you are typing on your laptop and this same attack can be easily executed while you are working with your device in a crowded place such as railway stations, airports, cybercafe, coffee shops and so on.

An attacker can intercept the sound waves that produced while typing on the keyboard of your laptop. An attacker can access your personal information or payment credentials by this new technique.

‌New research by the cybersecurity expert team from Darwin Deason Institute for Cybersecurity of Southern Methodist University (SMU), found that acoustic signals or sound waves, produced while typing on Keyboard can successfully be intercepted through the smartphones.

As we know the microphone can detect the sounds produced by keystroke, accelerometer and the gyroscope are used to capture the vibrations that resonate through a table when someone types.

To test their supposition, they used an app built by the team at SMU and detected 41.8% OF keystrokes and 27% of typed words correctly, even in noisy environments.

Nowadays smartphones have a variety of sensors that cause the phone to know its intention and can detect that attacker needs.

“Some sensors require the user to give permission to turn them on, but many of them are always turned on,” Thornton elucidated. 

“We used sensors that are always turned on, so all we had to do was develop a new app that processed the sensor output to predict the key that was pressed by a typist.”

But despite the success, the Researchers found 2 major challenges for this attack:

• The first challenge is that each type of keyboard is like a different drum with some specific sound.   

• The second challenge is that not all table vibrate the same.

“ The characteristics of the vibrations are affected differently depending upon the composition of the material of the table”, added by Thorton. 

Now you need to think twice before working in public spaces, with this latest discovery. You also need to install some kind of shield over your keyboard to limit the audiovisual sound produced by keystrokes like silicone keyword skin, which also have the advantage to protect your keyboard from spills, dust, crumbs, and key wear.