Who would have guessed, that a simple, mediocre-looking, old-fashioned electrical outlet would allow us to perform such tricks as on the movies where experienced hackers magically managed to move pages of  top-secret information right onto their laps in seconds?

Yet, those magicians already planning to reveal their secrets of stealing some computer keyboard-typed information’s, at the Black Hat USA conference which about to be held later this month.

And the trick itself turned out to be not at all as ingeniously complicated as we imagined. The typing process on a standard computer keyboard releases electrical signals through the cable to the PC. Normally, the signal would leak, because the cables aren’t shielded, via the ground wire in the cable, into the ground wire on the PC’s power supply. In simplest terms, the main issue is to detect these electrical signal leakage from the source computer (keyboard), and converting it back into alphanumeric characters in the hacker’s computer. The detecting process itself could be done by simply connecting a probe to a nearby power socket, up to 15 meters away from the source computer’s power supply.

And as it wasn’t enough, the hackers invented some ‘special tricks’ for those who work on an unplugged laptop or using a wireless keyboard: Pointing a laser beam to a shiny object on the source computer’s table, capturing the reflection by a receiving system, analyzing the vibrations which has unique patterns for each keys being stroke, and reconstructing it into words. A direct line of sight to the source computer and a few hundred dollars worth of equipment should do this trick.