New sonic keyboard technology uses your computer’s built-in microphone to monitor the sounds of your individual keystrokes, logging everything you do, according to new research conducted by Dr. Angstrom H. Troubadour and his team of unpaid graduate students.
This intuitive method of eavesdropping combines new with the old by “listening in” on audio footage through state-of-the-art noise analysis firmware, which is “baked into” PC components like the motherboard, but can also be flashed – or overwritten – with new, custom firmware that can also introduce privacy and security backdoors. Troubadour and his lab servants were able to find evidence of the keyboard spyware when a student was able to successfully visualize the data leaving her keyboard.
“Go ahead and type a few sentences, and be sure to listen to your keyboard,” Dr. Troubadour writes in the study. “Notice how with each individual keystroke, your keys – although similar and seemingly identical – make slightly different sounds. Because the untrained ear doesn’t recognize these subtle, everyday variations, you might not realize they are there, but because every key has slight variations in tone, tenor and frequency – in fact, no two keystrokes are alike in the entire world (much less, keyboards) – and because every individual keystroke has its own microscopic variation, their frequencies are logged and checked against a database of known typing habits assigned to your unique hardwire profile, as supplied by Google, Apple and Facebook tracking services. Everything you have ever typed is just floating around out there, for sale to anyone and everyone who wants it.”
With advances in HTML5, the entirety of this method of eavesdropping takes place entirely within the hardware, and is completely untraceable. Troubadour and his team have not commented on the spyware’s origin.
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