Gadgetory

these are the top five strange but true ways to get hacked time to get paranoid we are ranking these hacks from least likely to most likely to happen for this top five we asked an expert hack five zone Shannon Morse to help us out with this at number five laser microphones this hack dates back to 2009 and it was accomplished by inverse path here's how it works they pointed a laser at a laptop and sampled vibrations to determine keystrokes the team found pointing at the hinges led to better results in verse path did note that they know it's kind of hard to get line of sight to the laser microphone though and number four is inaudible audio this hack was built by the Fraunhofer Institute for communication information processing and ergonomics as a proof-of-concept in 2013 it used the built-in mics and speakers of two lenovo laptops to transmit data at a distance of around 65 feet this method transfer data at a pretty slow rate of 20 bits per second but that's plenty fast enough to grab keystrokes and number three hard drive silence researchers at ben-gurion University were able to transmit data from computers by reading a hard drive silence first malware needed to be installed on the victims computer the malware controls the actuator arm on the hard drive when that arm moves it makes a sound the malware would create sounds through the actuator arm audio frequencies could be picked up by a receiver like a phone or a laptop data speeds reached 180 bits per minute and could travel up to about 6 feet in distance this exact method would not work on SSDs because they don't have a clear arms and number two the hard drive led this one was also by researchers at ben-gurion University they found a way to turn that little hard drive light that flashes into a transmitter the victims computer would be infected with malware first then it would be able to cause the hard drive LED to flicker in a demo a camera on a drone was able to view the LED flickering which will be sending encoded data at number one accelerometer keylogging this hack was developed by researchers at Georgia Tech here's how or us the victim would download a malicious app that asked for permission to use the accelerometer so something like a level app then the app will be able to collect accelerometer data as you typed on this screen from that data the researchers could figure out what the victim was typing in one test the researchers tried this out on an iPhone 4 and found it's gyroscope helped clean up the data it was scraping thanks again to Shannon Morse for the help if you're interested in hacking things and check out hack 5 org Amaya's act on I'll see you online