A recent discovery by researchers at the University of the Republic of Uruguay has revealed that hackers can utilize AI to spy on a user’s display by capturing leaked electromagnetic radiation from a PC’s HDMI cable through a new technique, as reported by New Scientist.
These hackers employ various methods for their attacks, such as placing an antenna outside a building to intercept signals from the HDMI cable. By capturing this data, hackers can then proceed to access users’ sensitive information, including personal banking details or encrypted messages. Federico Larroca and his team at the university have developed an AI model capable of reconstructing signals from the leaked data even from several meters away.
The researchers trained an AI model to identify patterns by comparing the original and intercepted signals. They found that only 30% of the characters were misinterpreted. The team considered this error rate low, indicating that hackers could still decipher most of the text. Their method proved to be 70% more accurate than previous state-of-the-art attacks.
While these attacks are predominantly observed in government or industrial settings, precautions are already being taken in such buildings to safeguard their signals.
“Governments are concerned about this, but I wouldn’t say that average users need to be overly worried,” Larroca commented. “However, if you prioritize your security, for whatever reason, this could pose a potential threat.”
In the past, when everything was analog, it would have been even easier for hackers to reconstruct what was on a user’s screen using leaked video cable signals. Nevertheless, HDMI technology has made data transmission more intricate, although not immune to exploitation by hackers using AI. Therefore, there is currently no need to discard your HDMI cable.
