Vulnerable Wireless Peripherals

Billions of wireless peripherals are vulnerable to the MouseJack, KeySniffer and KeyJack vulnerabilities discovered by the Bastille Research Team. These vulnerabilities enable hackers to collect confidential information, impersonate users and carry out attacks on computers and corporate networks. To learn more about finding vulnerable wireless peripherals operating in your environment, read our Bastille data sheets or request a Bastille demo.

Key Takeaways

• Bastille research found MouseJack, KeySniffer, and related flaws across many wireless mouse and keyboard vendors
• A remote attacker with a radio dongle can inject keystrokes into a vulnerable machine from a distance, even another building
• Unencrypted keyboards leak every keystroke, including passwords and credit card numbers, in the clear
• Even some keyboards that advertise encryption can be defeated by replaying captured cryptographic data, and millions of vulnerable dongles are in use

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. My name is Balint Seeber, and I'm the director of vulnerability research at Bastille. I'd like to talk to you about vulnerable wireless mice and keyboards. This is an area of research that we've looked very closely into, and one of my colleagues, Mark Newlin, has actually discovered many different vulnerabilities affecting many different vendors of wireless mice and keyboards.

And fundamentally, what it allows you to do as a remote attacker with an antenna and a crazy radio dongle such as these two, is a, inject keystrokes into a remote machine. So, for instance, you might see across the way there's another office building. You can see a number of different screens and computers. Many of them will have wireless mice and keyboards.

Across this distance, you could pretend to be on that remote computer, and type things as if you were physically there, such as bringing up a shell, downloading some malicious software, installing a rootkit is quite a dire example. The other scenario there is actually key sniffing, as we call it, where you can have wireless keyboards that do not implement any encryption. So as you press a key on the keyboard, you can be listening with a similar setup, and actually see the very characters come out on your screen.

So that as people enter sensitive information, like passwords and credit card numbers, you will see them appear in clear text on your display. Another vulnerability that was found was a weakness in the encryption used in keyboards that actually do advertise encryption, where you can listen for a cryptographic exchange, take some of that data, and reuse it to inject your own keystrokes into the remote computer, again, being able to take that over remotely.

And once you can actually access and type things, there's the potential to compromise the network further by executing some malicious payload that will explore the network. So that is quite a serious attack vector, because there are millions and millions of these wireless USB dongles that are vulnerable out there in the wild. People use them in all sorts of different settings, including the corporate environment. And that can be an attack vector through which an attacker can gain access, not just through your standard means say, the internet.

Thanks very much for listening. If you'd like to learn more, please visit our website. [MUSIC PLAYING] PLAYING]