The other day we reported that researchers had found that certain brands of wireless keyboards were vulnerable to hacking, which meant that a hacker could effectively hack the keyboard and spy on you in terms of what you’re typing and sending. Turns out that we shouldn’t be worried about just our keyboards, but we should also be worried about our monitors too.
Speaking to Motherboard, a group of researchers from Red Balloon Security discovered that it was possible to hack monitors as well, meaning that not only can the hackers see what’s being displayed on your screen, but they can also manipulate what’s on your screen. This means that hackers will no longer have to rely on URLs that closely resemble official URLs when they can just fake the entire website, like that of your bank, credit card, PayPal accounts, and so on.
Other more nefarious and dangerous hacks that the researchers said could happen is messing a monitor that displays the controls for a power plant, which if the hacker so chose, they could fake an emergency thus leading the plant to be shut down. They also claim that this hack isn’t limited to any particular brand, and that if you own a monitor, you are probably vulnerable too.
However the upside is that this hack is slow in the sense that it takes a while for images to load. This means that if you’re constantly looking at the monitor, you will probably notice something suspicious happening. According to Cui, the chief scientist at Red Balloon Security, “We now live in a world where you can’t trust your monitor.”
