Using a wireless mouse or keyboard? Then you need to know about this

By Darren Allan

In a worrying development for those who use a wireless mouse or keyboard (or indeed both), these peripherals can be hacked from a distance, and then used by an attacker to carry out malicious actions, such as installing malware, on the connected laptop or PC.

This issue was discovered by Mark Newlin, a researcher for security firm Bastille, with the exploit being christened MouseJack. The vulnerability is in the way the cordless peripheral communicates with the wireless dongle plugged into a USB port on the PC – because this connection isn’t encrypted, an attacker can hack in and inject keystrokes onto the machine.

The attacker needs a computer equipped with its own wireless dongle to send the keystrokes, although implementing the attack was hardly a trivial process – PC World reports that it took Newlin “between days and weeks” to reverse engineer the wireless protocols to be able to inject said keystrokes.

From a distance

This can happen from a distance of up to a hundred yards away, apparently – as long as the attacker has line of sight on the victim’s machine – and it affects a large range of peripherals from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo, Logitech and Microsoft to …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components