Your monitor can be hacked, used to spy on you
Anti-virus software is often used to mitigate all sorts of attacks levied against computers, but what about their displays? Turns out, those can be manipulated in much the same manner as a pair of security researchers have demonstrated.
At the annual Def Con hacker convention in Las Vegas, Ang Cui and Jatin Kataria from Red Balloon Security said that in their spare time over the past two years, they reverse-engineered a Dell U2410 monitor to determine how it worked. In the process, they discovered that Dell hadn’t implemented any security with regard to how they update the display controller’s firmware.
What this means is that someone with access to the monitor’s USB or HDMI port can manipulate the on-screen pixels with nefarious intent. In one example, the two demonstrated the ability to change a PayPal account balance from $0 to $1 million.
