Is it ignorance, indemnity, or conspiracy that this News Media Corporation didn't give the primary mitigation?
A white noise generator.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Isn't boffin a derogatory term like "nerd"?
What a dogshit headline.
It can be. Being a boffin, I'm not offended. Up to the individual if they choose to be offended.
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It’s The Register - think the Financial Times for IT but in the style of The Sun/any other British tabloid. They do it for the lulz, if you will - don’t get too hung up on the headlines as the content is top quality.
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Might have to spend some time getting Easy Effects/Noise Torch set up on my systems again just to reduce the vectors again.
There is a good comment on this post on physical mitigation that seems helpful as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/uerp9z/comment/i6p0jqa/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In other words, this is a side channel attack with considerable accuracy, minimal technical requirements, and a ubiquitous data exfiltration point: Microphones, which are everywhere from our laptops, to our wrists, to the very rooms we work in.
To make matters worse, the trio said in their paper that they've achieved what they claim is an accuracy record for acoustic side-channel attacks (ASCA) without relying on a language model.
Luckily in this case it's not power usage, CPU frequencies, blinking lights or RAM buses leaking data unavoidably, but a good old-fashioned problem occurring between the computer and chair that can actually be mitigated somewhat easily.
The researchers note that skilled users able to rely on touch typing are harder to detect accurately, with single-key recognition dropping from 64 to 40 percent at the higher speeds enabled by the technique.
Working among the clacking of phantom keyboards would surely annoy everyone, which is why the researchers suggest only adding the sounds to Skype and Zoom transmissions after they've been recording instead of subjecting employees to real-time noisemakers.
Followup research is now going on into using new sources for recordings, like smart speakers, better keystroke isolation techniques and the addition of a language model to make their acoustic snooping even more effective.
The original article contains 656 words, the summary contains 210 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!