See your link here
Not much worth shouting about
1 comment- IT TOPICS:Security
Oh! Ma! GAWD! A hole in Vista? Can this BE?!? (*cough* *sorry*) Seriously, the reports of a weird vulnerability in Microsoft's new OS are interesting -- g0t f1rst!!!1 is something everyone enjoys playing now and then. But the "shout hacking" vuln sounds less like something that ought to concern a reasonable manager (or user) and more like a one-person game of Twister. Let's see: If speech recognition is enabled, and if the user has a mike and speakers hooked up, and if you can either get access to the machine or convince the user to play your audio file, and if you can do all this without anyone noticing a sufficiently loud "shout hack" in progress...
Whew. You'll pardon me if I'm not overwhelmed with this threat. It's good to spot potential problems, and anyone who feels they have an installation in which something like this might happen would be smart to lock it down: disable speech recognition, or if that's not practical beware of unknown audio files (or weirdos shouting at your computer -- hey, that's YOUR job). But do let's try to keep the hysterics and the name-coinage to a minimum, 'kay? Not like there's not enough to worry about already for most security folk.
Print
Email this
Digg this
