In this day and age, it seems like hackers have so many ways to exploit victims through online. According to researchers, even the desktop monitors can now be used by hackers to victimize users.
Ang Cui and Jatin Cataria, Researchers from Red Balloon Security, revealed at the annual Def Con convention in Las Vegas that they have discovered a way to manipulate the pixels coming out of a monitor.
For example, Cui and Jataria can make it appear in a monitor that a PayPal account has $1 million even though it really doesn’t have that amount of money.
To come up with this discovery, the two reverse-engineered a Dell U2410 monitor and found that Dell hadn’t installed any security concerning on how they update the display controller’s firmware.
With this development, it’s possible that cyber criminals could permanently display a message on a desktop screen and ask for ransom to remove it. It’s also likely that hackers could spy on a user by logging the monitor-generated pixels.
Cui and Jataria said that monitors from Hewlett-Packard, Acer, and Samsung could also be vulnerable to this attack.
The two said that they aim to raise awareness in monitor security.
(Photo Source: dell.com)
