Your monitor — yes, that’s right, your monitor — may be infected with a virus to spy on you, or worse. If you believe the latest alarm bells, that is.
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Tonight’s feature presentation: Do you trust your monitor?An article posted yesterday at one of the sub-channels of vice.com warns us: Hackers Could Break Into Your Monitor To Spy on You and Manipulate Your Pixels.
Seriously? Computer monitors are now on the list of things that can be hacked, and/or infected by malware? Apparently. But how could something that we consider to be totally passive, get invaded by outside forces?
Essentially, if a hacker can get you to visit a malicious website or click on a phishing link, they can then target the monitor’s embedded computer, specifically its firmware. This is the computer that controls the menu to change brightness and other simple settings on the monitor.
The hacker can then put an implant there programmed to wait for further instructions. Then, the way the hacker can communicate with the implant is rather shrewd. The implant can be programmed to wait for commands sent over by a blinking pixel, which could be included in any video or a website. Essentially, that pixel is uploading code to the monitor. At that point, the hacker can mess with your monitor.
Many articles on infections over the internet are sketchy on the actual details; this article is particularly sketchy, leaving lots of unanswered questions. For example, does the vulnerability of your monitor depend on what operating system you are running? After all, for some remote website to communicate back and forth with your monitor, there needs to be a pathway for some kind of data, that your system allows to get through. Hardware, operating systems, and device drivers need to allow this happen.
The article lays out one possibility of how the vulnerability could be exploited: say in a power plant, the systems that display plant/network status could be hacked to show a visual that is a panic situation, causing the humans watching the screens to take some undesirable action for the wrong reason. Perhaps going so far as to shut down the plant. Still, that seems like a stretch.
Supposedly there are a billion vulnerable monitors in businesses and in homes, worldwide. Is yours one of them?
If you have a monitor, chances are your monitor is affected, ...
The word they used is affected, not infected. I’m going to conclude that yours and mine probably aren’t. Yet.
Monitors are just the latest on a long list of The Internet of Hackable Things.
If you have a smart thermostat, it can be locked with ransomware that demands payment before you can regain control of your heating and air conditioning system. Your printer might be bugged, to transmit your data over radio waves. Phillips Hue lightbulbs, connected to the internet, can be controlled from up to 400 meters away. Printers connected to the internet but not protected against connections from pretty much anywhere, were instructed to print out racist flyers. (Heinous stuff there, you have been warned). A GPS Tracker for Kids Had a Bug That Would Let Hackers Stalk Them. Some models of wireless mouse and keyboard communicate to the computer via a dongle plugged into a USB port. A hacker can intercept the radio signal and replace it with their own, to take control of the computer. A Fisher-Price teddy bear has a camera in its nose, and has the potential to leak kids’ personal information over the internet. Owners of some Samsung smart refrigerators were startled that the calendar app no longer functioned on the fridge door, possibly because Google had deprecated or disabled the service. Other Samsung refrigerators allowed hackers to steal the owners’ Google credentials. Chrysler/Jeep vehicles seem particularly susceptible to hacking, enabling a key to be created using the vehicle’s VIN and a stolen VIN database. And hackers have demonstrated taking control of a moving vehicle, including shutting it down while being driven at highway speed. If you’re in Rio right now, just give up; you’re already screwed.Some of these exploits are very real, varying in degrees of difficulty getting all the way down to trivial. Others are more theoretical, and require some hands-on tinkering to achieve. But Jeebus, a monitor? Give me a break.
Are you scared yet? Going off the grid? We’ll miss you!
Top comments for sunday august 7, 2016From BeninSC:
I am trying to remember when I read a comment that touched me more than this one from first-time Daily Kos commenter, susanna pinto, on the real fight some have to make in our not-so-progressive-yet society, and on working to defeat Trump.
It’s in “Three Words That I Wish I’d Never Hear Democrats Say Again”, by Dartagnan.
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