Simon Says...

Nefarious hackers worldwide are constantly striving to infect your computer so they can tell it what to do. They find holes in software security, and the software publisher plugs it, in a never-ending escalation of cat and mouse. It's been going on so long I've gotten bored with the whole thing. But this latest exploit strangely amuses me...

It's been reported that a new weakness has been found in Microsoft's recently released new operating system, Vista. I have no plans to install Vista on my own machines, so it doesn't scare me, but it's just so funny...

The weakness involves Vista systems on which the speak recognition is turned on, with speakers and a microphone connected. The hack is performed by embedding speech commands in a web page, so that when the hapless human arrives at that web page, the web page plays commands over the speakers, which are then picked up by the microphone and interpreted by the speech recognition system. Hackers would finally be able to literally tell your system what to do:

"Simon says, 'Delete all your files!'"

What will they think of next?

Well, cynic that I am, I can easily imagine mumbling misfits recording commands that the recognition system interprets wrong. How many times has someone told you to do something and you heard it wrong? "You want me to what???"


Posted by Dave    Blog Tag: News