This horrifying Zoom hack will deter you from ever side-chatting again

[Imran]

Now that we spend so much of our days on Zoom, I think we can all be adult enough to admit: We’ve all side-chatted, saying one thing to the camera, and another on the side. Maybe it was a joke over Gchat at a coworker’s expense. Maybe it was just multitasking some emails. Maybe it was entering a password into another site.

It’s a relatively innocuous behavior, but it could come back to bite us. Researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Oklahoma have demonstrated something terrifying: They can read what people are typing during video calls on Zoom, Skype, and Google Hangouts with up to 93% accuracy. What are they analyzing to do so? Not your hands, but your shoulders.
“From a high-level perspective, this is a concern, which obviously has been overlooked for a while,” says University of Texas assistant professor of computer science Murtuza Jadliwala, who led the research, examining what could happen if your video meeting were hacked. “And actually, to be really frank, we didn’t start this work for COVID-19. This took a year. . . . But we started realizing in COVID-19, when everything [is in video chat], the importance of such an attack is amplified.”


The way a hack of this type would work is pretty simple. Anyone with access to your video feed could record it—whether that’s a nefarious stranger who broke into your feed, or someone you know who is part of your meeting. Then they would send that recorded video feed through software, which would analyze when you were typing, and what that typing contains.

Source : https://www.fastcompany.com/90570509/thi...ting-again