Hackers can now turn your headphones into a microphone that can capture your conversations

These days, nobody is truly safe around technology. While there are a number of lengths one can go to in order to avoid being a victim of hackers, there are so many ways for personal technologies to be taken advantage of, that it is more worrisome than ever.

Sadly, things are about to get even more complicated for those who want to stay safe on the cyber front. It has now been revealed that simply using headphones in order to hear audio coming from your computer or cell phone’s speakers may be putting you at risk of being hacked.

Andy Greenberg of Wired breaks it down, writing, “Just as the speakers in headphones turn electromagnetic signals into sound waves through a membrane’s vibrations, those membranes can also work in reverse, picking up sound vibrations and converting them back to electromagnetic signals.” He goes on to explain that “the RealTek chips are so common that the attack works on practically any desktop computer, whether it runs Windows or MacOS, and most laptops, too.”

This puts many of your private conversations at risk of being overheard and recorded by hackers. Every conversation you have around headphones that are plugged in is susceptible to being exploited, which is a frightening thing to believe. Conversations we have within the privacy of our own homes are not meant to be heard by anyone who isn’t present at the moment, so having them be recorded for twisted reasons is upsetting and dangerous.

Now, more than ever, people need to be more protective and selective of what technological devices they use and where they use them. It privacy matters to you at all, you need to go to much greater lengths to keep it safe than you likely have been. It is a shame that we have to deal with this at all, but there are people trying to gain our private information all around us.

If it isn’t the hackers, it’s the federal government. It’s hard to decide which one is more frustrating. …

Sources:

Wired.com

Pitchfork.com

DigitalMusicNews.com