In this age of technological progress, spying on people has become easier than ever. Therefore, more and more conspiracy theorists appear who stick stickers on the eyes of their webcams and keep their microphones muted most of the time.
However, Israeli security experts say this is not enough to avoid surveillance. It turns out that it is possible to eavesdrop on an ordinary user of a personal computer through headphones.
“How so? - you ask. - After all, the earphone is a sound output device, not an input. You need a microphone to eavesdrop on someone."
The fact is that the thin film membranes in the headphones, thanks to which sound is heard, can also act as sound pickup membranes. Thus, cyber-bullies or spies can hear you even through headphones you are not using, lying, for example, on your computer desk. To do this, they need to hack into your computer and take advantage of a vulnerability in the Realtek audio codec, which is equipped with the vast majority of modern motherboards.
The victim does not even need to plug their headphones into the microphone jack, which can be done by mistake unless completely illiterate PC users.
To test their theory, Israeli developers created a small virus called "Speake (a) r" - a pun on the English words for "speaker" and "ear". Using an exploit found in Realtek codecs, the experts attacked their own computer and programmatically swapped its microphone and headphone jacks. As a result, the most ordinary headphones with a "slight movement of the hand" turned into a full-fledged microphone.
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Why is an ordinary person protected from wiretapping?
The video below shows how experts pick up the music playing in the adjacent room with their headphones. Moreover, the quality of the audio, according to the Israelis, is quite high: the most ordinary headphones allow you to hear sounds within a radius of six to seven meters from you.
Of course, this is just a harmless experiment, and the average person should not immediately throw their headphones into the trash after this shocking information. This experience only demonstrates how vulnerable we are in front of current technologies. And this is just one example of such interference without the knowledge of the person.
True, ordinary people should not be afraid of such wiretapping. Firstly, you are simply not interesting to anyone, like that elusive Jack from the anecdote. And secondly, even if someone hears what you are doing during your work or free time, this information is unlikely to help the attacker enrich himself at your expense or in any way annoy you. It is no coincidence that even in spiritual practice there is such a concept as the protection of a person by his dullness. But as soon as a person begins to grow spiritually, then all kinds of temptations and attacks of dark forces await him …