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JERUSALEM: A new study has claimed that hackers can access any computer using the power supply unit.
A cybersecurity researcher at the Ben Gurion University in Israel, Dr. Mordechai Guri, said, “The attack works by making the power supply unit relay the data in an ultrasonic form and can be used to siphon data from air-gapped systems.”
According to Guri, the air gap systems are the ones that are not connected to any sort of connection, including ethernet and Wi-Fi.
The uprooting of data using the power supply unit is quite simple as the malware dubbed power-supply alters the processing unit’s workload such that the ultrasonic frequencies produced are altered.
This way, all the read data can be recorded within a radius of 5 metre. The changes in ultrasonic frequency emitted comes from the CPU’s transformers and capacitors.
An attack of this sort does not require any special hardware. However, the data rate stands at a low 50 bits per second, making the success rate almost negligible.
Additionally, the malware needs to be manually installed on the victim’s computer. In most cases, hackers cannot directly access computers.
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