Your computer, phone and even printer could be spying on you.

Experts have warned everyday machines such as these may be used to bug any kind of building remotely.

A new king of malware uses circuits found on most devices and radio frequency waves to turn them into listening devices, without the hackers even accessing the machines.

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A new king of malware uses circuits found on most devices and radio frequency waves to turn them into listening devices, without the hackers even accessing the machines. The malware, named 'Funtenna' by lead researcher Ang Cui from Red Balloon Security, would be hard to detect

HOW DOES FUNTENNA WORK? Funtenna exploits radio frequencies, or RF signals, to turn office equipment into bugging devices. It uses all the common pieces of hardware that can be found in basically every embedded device. By uploading the malware to a device, the hackers can vibrate the prongs on general-purpose input/output circuits, on most embedded devices, at a frequency of their choice. These vibrations can be picked up by a radio antenna. In an example, the software was delivered to the phone through a printer. The researchers sent a document, in the form of a CV, to the printer, which was connected to the same network as the phone, which installed the malware. The phone then began transmitting the conversation it could hear using radio waves to a nearby computer. Because the devices themselves are acting as transmitters, the technique bypasses all conventional network security. Advertisement

The malware, named 'Funtenna' by lead researcher Ang Cui from Red Balloon Security, would be hard to detect because no traffic logs would catch data leaving the premises.

New York-based Red Balloon Security is a group of 'white hat 'hackers - computer security experts who break security so that a weakness can be found, fixed and improved, to make sure a company's information is secure.

The company designs security systems to defend against these kind of attacks.

Funtenna exploits radio frequencies, or RF signals, to turn office equipment into bugging devices.

It uses 'all the common pieces of hardware that you find in basically every embedded device,' Mr Cui told Motherboard in a YouTube video.

It forces the hardware to transmit a signal that sends data to the hacker.

By uploading the malware to a device, the hackers can vibrate the prongs on general-purpose input/output circuits, that are found on most embedded devices, at a frequency of their choice

These vibrations can be picked up by a radio antenna.

Because the devices themselves are acting as transmitters, the technique bypasses all conventional network security.

In an, the software was delivered to an office phone through a printer connected to the same network. Theoretically this could be used to make phones in an office transmit the conversations in the room to the hacker

Or it can be used to make a phone transmit the incoming data - by switching the input pin in an office phone to go to output to make the phone think it was off the hook when it is not.

One of the most dangerous parts of this is that it was done through software, Mr Cui says, 'so nobody had to sneak into this room to tamper with the phone, it was all just software through the network.'

In the example Mr Cui demonstrated in the video, the software was delivered to the phone through a printer.

The researchers sent a document, in the form of a CV, to the printer, which was connected to the same network as the phone.

'The resume rewrites the firmware on the printer to do whatever we want,' Mr Cui said. 'What we want to do is find all the phones.'

The printer was used to turn all the vulnerable phones into listening devices.

The same could be used on printers to cause them to vibrate, transmitting the data as Morse code, that can be picked up by radio antennae.

Mr Cui first showed the system in action at the annual security conference Black Hat last year in Las Vegas.

An expert at the conferene called the malware 'hardware agnostic' and able to operate with almost all modern computer systems and embedded devices.

The tool's development over the past three years is another illustration that a broadening array of devices can be manipulated in unpredictable ways and that attackers increase their advantage over defenders as gadgets grow more complex.