Here’s how your monitor could be hacked to spy on you

By Darren Allan

There’s been plenty happening over at the Defcon 24 hacking conference in Las Vegas, and another worrying development is the emergence of news that the humble monitor can be hacked.

A monitor, hacked? How exactly? Well, that’s a good question, and the simple answer is that it’s possible to do so if an attacker can get physical access to the monitor’s USB or HDMI port – via which they can access the firmware of the display.

Two enterprising security experts, Ang Cui and Jatin Kataria (from Red Balloon Security) discovered this by reverse-engineering a Dell U2410 monitor. This was not a trivial process – it took over two years, as PC World reports – but the pair noted that there was a complete lack of security when it came to the firmware update process, which allowed for the hack.

Ransoming or spying

Once a monitor has been hacked, an attacker can manipulate the hardware to display a message permanently on-screen, for example – which could be a new strain of computer-based ransoming, demanding payment to remove said message.

Or perhaps even worse, particularly if we are talking about businesses, it could be possible to log the pixels generated by the monitor and effectively …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components