If you are habitual to believing whatever appears on your computer screens then it is the time to be conscious as you might never know and the hackers may have got access to the monitor. It is a common fact that they are targeting your laptops, tablets, and cell phones, but security experts have proved that they can harm you by accessing monitor settings and making it work against you. They do it by changing pixels, which is a complex task to perform, but not an impossible one.
These facts were demonstrated by renowned researchers, Ang Cui and Jatin Kataria from Red Balloon Security. They proved how hackers can configure pixel settings that define the way something appears on the screen and manipulate the pixels to show others.
What does it need to hack a monitor?
The researchers stated that the attackers cannot do it so without gaining physical access to the USB or HDMI ports in the monitor. They first gain the physical access and then harm the display firmware. The experience took around two years for the research to explore this distinct process that a hacker can exploit to harm you as it was done through a reverse-engineering hack on a Dell U 2410 monitor.
They also found that the Dell monitors lack the security measures of updating the firmware of the display monitors and that’s why they become successful in manipulating the pixels. It simply concludes that any person with a negative mind can hack the screen by inserting a drive with a malicious firmware.
To what extent it is dangerous for you?
Changing an option or an amount, or replacing an image without can cause huge damages to the user. The research demonstrated the hidden consequences by replacing a Green alert status to Red of a power plant, which can deceive others that a power plant is shutting while it is still running.
They also tested the manipulating of figures in a PayPal account by replacing the balance of $0 with $1,000,000,000. They concluded that with this procedure, the hacker is not required to infect a computer system as it can be done by getting direct access to the monitor.
The research also suggested that such a hacking technique may also allow an attacker to spy on you either you use a Dell monitor or any of the brands available in the market. The two experts suggest that a user can find either his screen pixels are manipulated or not by observing the time a screen takes to load each time, as an infected monitor may show slow performance as compared to a non-infected one.
