Data typed on a laptop can be eavesdropped by hackers via smartphones

Would you believe if you were told that hackers can silently steal your data and private conversation while you are typing on your laptop. You may even be a target of this attack even in a crowded place.

Yes, this attack is highly possible when done through acoustic signals or sound waves that are produced when a user is typing on a computer keyboard. These signals are then picked up by smartphone sensors including the microphone, the accelerometer, and the gyroscope. This attack was tested by a team from SMU.

The sound made by the Keystrokes is detected by the microphone and the accelerometer, and the gyroscope is used to capture the faint vibration that reverberates through a table when someone types.

The SMU team tested their hypothesis using an iPhone app built using artificial intelligence & Swift and Apple's open-source programming language. Using the app, they had managed to detect 41.8% of keystrokes and 27% of typed words correctly. This accuracy includes the data collected even in a noisy environment.

"We found that increasing the number of smartphones used causes overall accuracy to increase up to about 4 phones, but adding any more than 4 phones causes only minimal accuracy increases with our technique," confirmed Mitchell Thornton, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Southern Methodist University (SMU), Forbes reported.