Could the Blinking Light on Your Computer be a Vulnerability?

written by Chris Griesemer

Have you ever looked at your computer and noticed there is a hard drive light that is always blinking? My computer could be inactive for 15 minutes and it seems like that light is blinking away. I was curious to learn what this could mean; here's what I found...

According to Nicky Cappella at The Stack, a security site, hackers have created malware that when loaded on a computer, can turn the hard drive light into a Morse-code type message. The malware caused the light to blink at 5800 blinks per second and can transmit data at about 2 mb per hour. This is not very fast but when all that is being transmitted is usernames and passwords, it doesn’t have to be fast. In the example I viewed, researchers from Ben-Gurion University loaded the malware on a computer in a locked office and then used a drone to fly outside the window of the office housing the computer, record the blinking light for 2 minutes, landed the drone and then downloaded the data and decrypted the blinking light into a message. If this type of hacking becomes popular, new security strategies will have to be used to hide the hard drive light or at least keep it out of public view.

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Source: https://thestack.com/security/2017/02/23/hard-drive-led-can-leak-air-gapped-data/?utm_content=bufferaffe1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer