Speakers are everywhere, whether it's expensive, standalone sound systems, laptops, smart home devices, or cheap portables. And while you rely on them for music or conversation, researchers have long known that commercial speakers are also physically able to emit frequencies outside of audible range for humans. At the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas on Sunday, one researcher is warning that this capability has the potential to be weaponized.
It’s creepy enough that companies have experimented with tracking user browsing by playing inaudible, ultrasonic beacons through their computer and phone speakers when they visit certain websites. But Matt Wixey, cybersecurity research lead at the technology consulting firm PWC UK, says that it’s surprisingly easy to write custom malware that can induce all sorts of embedded speakers to emit inaudible frequencies at high intensity, or blast out audible sounds at high volume. Those aural barrages can potentially harm human hearing, cause tinnitus, or even possibly have psychological effects.
“I’ve always been interested in malware that can make that leap between the digital world and the physical world,” Wixey says. “We wondered if an attacker could develop malware or attacks to emit noise exceeding maximum permissible level guidelines, and therefore potentially cause adverse effects to users or people around.”
Lily Hay Newman covers information security, digital privacy, and hacking for WIRED.
The research analyzed the potential acoustic output of a handful of devices, including a laptop, a smartphone, a Bluetooth speaker, a small speaker, a pair over-ear headphones, a vehicle-mounted public address system, a vibration speaker, and a parametric spe ..
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