Could your keyboard spy on you?
Researchers say that small devices called ?JitterBugs? could piggyback onto network connections to discreetly send passwords and other sensitive data over the Internet.
Like the current keylogger hardware used by the FBI and criminals alike to record passwords and other data, JitterBugs are small devices that attach to a keyboard and record what users type. Unlike current keyloggers, which store the data to internal memory, JitterBugs do not have to be retrieved before captured data can be read.
Although no such device has been found ?in the wild? yet, researchers have developed a working prototype, and they postulate that similar ideas may have already been used in unnoticed attacks.
In a paper titled ?Keyboards and Covert Channels,? University of Pennsylvania grad students explain that the device could encode data in keystrokes by introducing an extra delay between when a key is pressed and when the keyboard tells the computer that the key has been pressed.
