Beware the Haunted Cordless keyboard

dr. greenthumb writes "The norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reports about an incident where a computer suddenly seemed to develop a life of its own. A game which the user could not remember using that day suddenly appeared on the screen. When he went over to shut it off the screen displayed a message asking him if he "really wanted to delete this file?" His computer was receiving keystrokes from another computer (with the same type of wireless keyboard) 150 metres away! Check out the full story and a follow-up, where experts warns against using wireless keyboards." /me plans to destroy Hemos' sanity...

Comments

SecurityFocus Discussed This

[Xenographic]

Wireless keyboards have other security issues. Read up on the discussion that took place about this on SecurityFocus: http://online.securityfocus.com/archive/82/173944

Re:see why...

[PunchMonkey]

I like having a cord on my mouse and keyboard because 1) i know it's connected and 2) i know another isn't. Wireless keyboards etc. have no less a security risk...

Don't place too much confidence in the security of your keyboard, someone might slip one of these on.

Re:FCC wont let me be

[lostchicken]

To be more complete, a Part 15 device is a secondary (or tertiary, if there is already a secondary) user of the entire radio frequency spectrum. That means that they can use the RF spectrum, as long as they don't cause harmful interference to a user with higher priority.

That means that if your device is hurting my ham radio operations on 146.880 MHz, then I sic the FCC on you, but if I interfere with you, I have primary user rights, so you're outta luck.

The primary, secondary, etc. system is just a pecking order for RF users. You can interfere with those with higer priority all you want, but Part 15 is always at the bottom.