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Hackers can spy on you from your ordinary light bulb using this method

Ordinary light bulb
Ordinary light bulb

One thing is for certain that privacy and security is a myth in this day and age and that we have already seen in the times of Covid-19 when hacking incidents were being reported left, right and centre. But it is also known that the more you have connected things in your life, the more your chances of getting hacked increase. If not hacking, you are always at the risk of being spied on and that could be dangerous as well. Because the hacker would not disrupt service but take details out of your life and then have one massive attack.

But this new report is a lot disturbing for everyone out there who fears being spied upon. This report claims that hackers are now using the ordinary light bulb that hangs in your living room or your bedroom or anywhere else to listen to your conversation. Now, you would ask how is that even possible since the bulb is not IoT meaning it is not connected to the internet. This attack discovered by the security researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel states it as a “Lamphone attack”.

This hacking or spying attack is “performed by using a remote electro-optical sensor to analyze a hanging light bulb’s frequency response to sound”. Researchers found out that “Lamphone can be used by eavesdroppers to recover human speech (which can be accurately identified by the Google Cloud Speech API) and singing (which can be accurately identified by Shazam and SoundHound) from a bridge located 25 meters away from the target room containing the hanging light bulb.”

From this, you can understand that the conversations are not being heard in real-time which the smart speakers having mics were said to be doing. But with this attack, you can recover audio and music from the frequency of a light bulb. But this is even scarier because while a smart speaker can be avoided, a light bulb is everywhere so the risks of spying increase to almost 100%.