Hackers are spying on victims from hundreds of feet away by monitoring flickering light bulbs. According to Fox News' latest report, the new hacking technique called "lamphone" was developed by the researchers at Israeli's Ben-Gurion University of the Weizmann and Negev Institute of Science.
The response to sound by the light bulb's frequency was observed using a special sensor that analyzes fluctuations in the air pressure that causes vibrations.
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The hacking tactic was first reported by Wired, stating that cyber attackers only need a telescope, an electro-optical sensor, and a laptop to extract sounds and speech from an individual in another location using the lamphone technique. Researchers claimed that the lamphone hacking technique is unlike other spying methods since it can be carried out in real-time.
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According to the researchers, the results acquired by the hackers are so accurate that even Shazam can recognize it or can be transcribed by Google's speech. Shazam was able to identify the song "Clocks" of Coldplay being played in a room 25 meters away in a test run of the new technology.
The speech of Trump saying "We will make America great again" was played over speakers and accurately transcribed by Google text to speech API according to the researchers. The hacking process can be avoided by the victims using weaker bulbs that emit less light for capture, or heavier light bulbs that provide less light vibration since the lamphone hack requires a visible hanging light in the room.
Lamphone measures the tiny changes in light output
According to Wired's latest report, the researchers stated that the hackers can discern the contents of conversations or even recognize a piece of music by picking up sound through measuring the tiny changes in light output from the bulb that those vibrations cause.
"Any sound in the room can be recovered from the room with no requirement to hack anything and no device in the room," said Ben Nassi, a security researcher at Ben-Gurion who developed the hacking tactic together with fellow researchers Boris Zadov and Yaron Pirutin. The report stated that Zadov is planning to present their findings in August at the Black Hat security conference. "You just need line of sight to a hanging bulb, and this is it," he said.
The researchers put each eyepiece of a series of telescopes eight feet away from a target's office light bulb, in front of a Thorlabs PDA100A2 electro-optical sensor in their study. The laptop they set-up, fed by the information acquired, analyzed the readings from the speech recordings and music played in the faraway room.
However, Nassi claimed that the hacking technique doesn't require a visible light bulb inside a room. Analysis of the video acquired is needed to convert the subtle vibrations observed in an object into the sounds it picked up.
