Rampant cordless keyboard strikes again

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article.jhtml?articleID=474623

Aftenposten's Norwegian reporter
Per Kristian Bjørkeng
21 January 2003 

Hewlett-Packard Norway will no longer guarantee their cordless 
keyboards for security after yet another report that they transmit 
keystrokes far afield. This time typing went astray in Oslo.

Are Wormnes got a shock when his neighbor Ørjan Stokkeland rang him up 
and asked him if he by any chance was writing a letter to telephone 
company Telenor. 

Wormnes can be thankful for a considerate neighbor - everything he was 
typing on his computer could have been read.

Last autumn a similar case made headlines. Two Stavanger men 
discovered they were connected when a neighbor recognized a letter 
mysteriously appearing on his machine to be emanating from his boss a 
few doors away.

Hewlett-Packard first claimed that this was a quirk, but replacement 
equipment produced the same results, with information being directly 
transmitted to the neighbor's computer, despite it being far out of 
advertised range and with several walls between.

The latest case took place in Bestum, Oslo, and took about a week to 
clear up.

Stokkeland began noticing strange characters appearing on his screen. 
Occasionally a new program would open, and text would suddenly appear 
in the address field of his browser while he was online. He couldn't 
access his e-mail because the wrong characters kept appearing in the 
password field.

"I was a bit worried about a virus, I was sure I had one. I deleted 
and reinstalled my firewall but it didn't help. I couldn't understand 
what was going on," Stokkeland said.

His neighbor Wormnes works from home, and spends a lot of his time 
typing at his computer, causing Stokkeland almost constant problems. 

"Finally I opened a Word document. There I saw the "virus" writing a 
letter to Telenor complaining about a bill. When I saw the sender's 
address I understood the connection. It's crazy. I could have just 
left the document open and read everything he wrote," Stokkeland said.

Wormnes rang up HP and was told that "this kind of thing could 
happen". Hewlett-Packard advised him to speak with all neighbors 
within a radius of 100 meters and switch his keyboard to a channel 
they weren't using.

"There must be 100 people in that area. It's impossible to talk with 
all of them," Wormnes said, and that is not even the worst of it.

"If a neighbor wants to listen in, there is no way to stop them. I got 
a message from HP that another alternative was "not to write any 
sensitive information". I think that's horrible. In practice the 
product is useless. They sell it without any mention of the danger," 
Wormnes said.

HP apologized via press spokesman Joakim Larsen for the advice to 
avoid writing sensitive information.

"That just isn't adequate. It is also regrettable that he was told to 
arrange channel selection with his neighbors. Those that have had this 
problem have switched to our new model with 256 different channels and 
higher security. Each time the computer is turned on the keyboard 
chooses a new channel at random. Then it is not possible to monitor 
someone's computer all the time," Larsen said.

Larsen agreed that this did not prevent someone from intermittently 
reading what was being written with the new keyboards.

"You won't be 100 percent safe with the new model either. If you want 
to be completely sure that no one can see what you are writing then 
you should use a keyboard with a cord," Larsen said.


 
*==============================================================*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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