Peter Dockrill reports:
Scientists in Israel have demonstrated a new vulnerability in computers, with a hack that makes PCs leak sensitive data encoded in the subtle (or not so subtle) whirring noises of their hard drives.
The attack, called DiskFiltration, is the latest technique to show that even PCs that are completely disconnected from the internet and any local networks – known as air-gapped computers – aren’t necessarily safe from hackers.
“An air-gap isolation is considered to be a hermetic security measure which can prevent data leakage,” Mordechai Guri, a security researcher from Ben-Gurion University, told Dan Goodin at Ars Technica.
Read more on ScienceAlert.
I presume somebody has to have physical access to at least gain proximity tothe air-gapped computer, to arrange for a microphone to listen to the hard drive noises – – and as we’ve known for sixty years, “physical access trumps everything.”