Get the latest tech news
Watch How a Hacker’s Infrared Laser Can Spy on Your Laptop’s Keystrokes
Hacker Samy Kamkar is debuting his own open source version of a laser microphone—a spy tool that can invisibly pick up the sounds inside your home through a window, and even the text you’re typing.
In a famous scene from the 1992 movie Sneakers, a hacker classic, the main characters park a surveillance van across the street from their target's office and point a telephoto lens through his window—only to find that their view of his computer keyboard is blocked by the surprise entrance of his love interest at the precise moment when he types his password. At the Defcon security conference this weekend in Las Vegas, renowned hacker Samy Kamkar plans to debut his own DIY advances in a form of laser-based surveillance, demonstrating that he can point a laser that's invisible to the human eye at a faraway laptop, through a window, and detect the computer's vibrations to reconstruct virtually every character typed on it. More than a warning about any particular spy trick, he hopes his Defcon talk will inspire the conference's hacker audience to think more broadly about how information resonates through the real world in unexpected and exploitable ways, defying any simple model of computer security.
Or read this on Wired
