Most of us take for granted that our information is safe and that no one really wants to hack into our computers, but perhaps that complacency that led to a lot of exploits and vulnerabilities that hackers could potentially take advantage of. Researchers at the Tel Aviv University have recently created a device called PITA that can apparently slowly siphon data from your laptop without you noticing.
Shaped like the size of a pita sandwich which basically consists of a HDMI stick PC and a radio dongle, what this device does is that it listens for electromagnetic pulses emitted by laptops, and from there it will start to harvest the data from the laptop bit by bit. The technology also relies on an exploit found on GPG which has since thankfully been patched by the folks at GNU.
For those unfamiliar, GPG helps to secure things like your chat conversations, emails, and BItCoin wallets, so as you can imagine exploiting something like that could allow hackers access to a treasure trove of sensitive personal and financial information that you wouldn’t think they would have access to.
However if anything, the PITA device does serve as a stark reminder that we need to be more vigilant about protecting our data. The researchers who created PITA also believe that their method could potentially work on other encryption types such as RSA and are working on expanding the device’s 19-inch range.