You’ve probably come across a photo of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg sitting in front of a laptop with the webcam and microphone taped up. This is because there are hacks and exploits out there that could potentially hack into your webcam and microphone, thus picking up both audio and video at the same time.
However it seems that you should now be careful about your headphones as well. Researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University have recently managed to create a piece of malware that can hijack the audio jack retasking function of RealTek codecs that are typically bundled with most PC motherboards. What happens is that they are then able to use headphones to listen in on the user.
Wait, so how is this possible? Aren’t headphones meant to deliver sound to our ears? This because the sound waves and vibrations we make when we speak are carried to the diaphragms of the headphones, which can double up as a pseudo-microphone, although it will require the malware installed for it to work.
In the video above you can see that the sound quality it picks up is actually pretty decent. Unfortunately we’re not sure if there is going to be a patch released by RealTek that could fix this exploit. However the good news is that there are no reported cases of this exploit being taken advantage of, and the current fix is simple: unplug your headphones when not in use.
Filed in . Read more about Hack, Headphones and Security.