Your computer mouse can listen to your conversations, suggests new study

Depending on the voice frequency, the team said they were able to capture speech with 61 per cent accuracy. But to eavesdrop on your conversations using mouse, the bad actor will have to first infect your system. However, since peripherals like mouse are not that rigorously scanned by security solutions, it allows attackers to easily extract the information.

Once researchers collected enough data, they then passed it through what is called as a Wiener filter to denoise it and feed it to an AI system to identify words. And while words are relatively hard to decipher, numbers are pretty easy to detect, which means attackers can potentially track your credit card numbers. You can watch how Mic-E-Mouse works in the video below.

This type of attack may look like dangerous at first, but the study lists down some limitations. First, the mouse should be placed on a flat and clear surface. If it is on a mouse maty or desk cover, the ability to collect data diminishes by a lot. Also, environmental noise is another factor that makes deciphering conversation much harder.

Researchers also clarify that this type of attack is very hard to pull of since it requires specific conditions, but the study does shed light on how simple peripherals like mice, which are often ignored from security point of view, can be used as an eavesdropping tool.