The laser reads with.

Trojan software? Phishing? All too complicated. With a laser eavesdropping, researchers can sound of the letters on each key detect. Passwords and account numbers could be so much easier to capture than before.

 

Who a computer user's passwords will elicit, mostly by trying the software. So-called keyboard sniffer software (also loosely called keyloggers) registered every keystroke, send their recordings via the Web at Lauscher. But how do you get the sniffing software on the PC? By the victim collapses, the software is installed by hand? Or by trojan program that is on the computers of the target person einschleust? Both methods are expensive, take time and can take appropriate security measures difficult or even prevented.

DPA
Lauschangriff: By laser microphone Keystrokes can also be intercepted and decoded are

Two much simpler, faster and yet also cheap interception methods now have the engineers of the British security firm
Inverse Path developed. At the security conference
CanSecWest in Vancouver, Canada, demonstrated Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco, how Keystrokes abhorchen by laser or the power grid can erschnüffeln.

Almost like a proposal for "Wetten dass?" their method appears, clicks on the sound to see. To the clicking of the keys to eavesdrop, the researchers used a so-called laser microphone. Normally such devices are known only from intelligence thrillers. In those spies hear their opponents through windows closed to through it. The trick: These microphones are so sensitive that even the minimal vibration record into which the sound of a conversation puts a window. The technique includes the repertoire of police investigators.

High-tech attack for 60 euros

Barisani and Bianco have a mic now so modified that it also works through windows and through the clicks of a PC or notebook registered. A software that works like a similar text program, extrapolated from the respective clicking sounds, which key was just pressed, similar to their results with a dictionary and try it, meaningful words together. Overall, according to the researchers, the equipment costs for such a high-tech attack just $ 80, so not even 60 euro.

Slightly more expensive on the other hand, could intercept the second variant, which the two at the security conference imagined. With an oscilloscope it investigated current fluctuations in an electrical outlet, which is 50 meters away from the PC abzuhörenden was appropriate. Letters or even whole words, the eavesdropper in this way does not recognize, but still identify individual keystrokes. Researchers are optimistic, however, even this hurdle will soon be able to.

At least the latter method, however, there is an equally simple as widespread repellent. Because the method only works with keyboards that have outdated PS/2-Buchse to the PC. Once you have a USB keyboard or the keypad of a notebook is used, before such tests therefore immune from eavesdropping. There are so not. Finally, researchers at the University of Saarbrücken already developed a system by which the contents of a screen whose
Reflections on a coffee cup can be reconstructed.

Had become necessary to develop this technology until the advent of LCD Monitors: Traditional CRT monitors emit so hard that her image even from a respectable distance even through walls and reconstruct observed.