A scanner darkly: how your flatbed could be at risk from a smart bulb

By Darren Allan

Increasingly of late, we’ve been hearing about how various pieces of hardware can be hacked in improbable sounding ways – like your monitor, for example – and here’s another: your scanner could potentially be compromised via a smart bulb.

Yes, you read that correctly. There are caveats here, as you might expect, one of them being that the flatbed scanner has to be left with its lid open, because in this case, it’s sensitive to changes in the light levels of the surrounding area.

And a would-be attacker could exploit that fact and leverage the scanner as a backdoor onto a company network, using something as simple as a smart light bulb which is installed in the same room.

This comes from a paper – ‘Oops! I Think I Scanned Malware’ – authored by researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science, both of which are in Israel.

Drones with frickin’ laser beams

The scientists successfully used a direct laser light to transmit a message that triggered malware on a PC via a connected flatbed scanner, with the laser being situated up to half a mile away, or mounted on a drone hovering outside the office …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components