Flaw Puts a Billion Wireless Mice at Risk

Wireless mice and keyboards are the perfect accessories for a world in which devices increasingly are shuffling off their connection coils, but those accessories -- especially untethered rodents -- also can  new threats for those who use them.

One such threat is Mousejack. The attack exploits a vulnerability found in 80 percent of wireless mice. With US$15 worth of off-the-shelf hardware and a few lines of simple code, a wireless mouse can be turned into a hacker's portal for all kinds of mischief.
Mousejack -- the name Bastille, which discovered the flaw last year, gave to the vulnerability -- impacts more than a billion wireless mice worldwide, the company's chief revenue officer, Ivan O'Sullivan, said.
One of Bastille's engineers, Marc Newlin, discovered the vulnerability in non-Bluetooth wireless mice. The flaw in the mice is related to how the devices handle encryption.
"When evaluating these devices, it became apparent that they do not implement encryption in a correct way and make it possible to bypass encryption in certain situations," he told TechNewsWorld.