Radio Daze: Are Your Keyboards Sending Signals To Cybercrooks?

Some new research confirms that even wired keyboards may be sending detectable keystrokes as much as twenty meters. Detectable signals means signals that can be captured, and that twenty meters includes penetrating walls. Great.The findings from a team of Swiss security researchers was based on capturing the electromagnetic spectrum if the vicinity of the keyboard, then recovering keystroke patterns from the spectrum.

While the technical expertise necessary to perform such a capture is probably (one hopes) beyond the skillset of most cybercrooks (always allowing for the geek factor) the findings are significant as a reminder of just how open even our most closed systems may well be.

Nothing particularly dire or of immediate concern here (words I sincerely hope I don't regret any time time soon, or ever) -- and not even particularly new: this sort of eavesdropping has been a topic of concern at government and other security agencies for some time.

Just one more little worry to add to the collection of obscure, specialized and hyper-technical vulnerabilities that seems to grow larger every few weeks.

A video and description of the experiment can be found here.