Paranoid client

[KRSESQ]

One of my clients is particularly paranoid and has become convinced that his monitor may be a source of hacking intrusions. His reasoning is, the manufacturers may be including a chip in the monitor that will receive signals to trigger a virus or other malicious activity on the computer. I conceded that such a thing may be possible but is not very probable.

Has anyone else heard such a rumor? Given how monitors are built and used, is such a thing even possible?

Kevin

[rylan]

Well I'd be extremely impressed/amazed if somebody figured out how to send malicious code over the monitor (slave) DDC link while getting windows to acknowledge the commands and give access to something more than monitor type in display properties.

[schmosef]

Unchecked buffer overrun?

Just kidding. That's ridiculous.

Might as well start wearing a tin foil hat to prevent the aliens from reading your mind!

[VJ]

Just to play devils advocate: some monitors do have a USB connection, that can be used for various monitor settings. Eizo allows it to be used for security: in combination with their software, the monitor checks the PC (or another PC in the network) for a certificate and blanks the display if it cannot find it. Stealing the monitor therefor renders it useless.

Timex had watches/digital reminders that could receive data from a monitor: the watch has a light sensor, you held this in front of a window (displayed by the Timex synch software), and this windows flashed; these flashes were actually the encoded data...

http://www.timex.com/html/data_link.html

But to my knowledge, those are the only datarelated communications that were/are used on a monitor... And none of them does what your client says...



Jörg

[schmosef]

That reminds me of a story...

Back in high school we had a lab of Macs. Around that time there was a brief period when a certain Mac plug-in was really popular. I don't remember what it was called but it added two googly eyes to the Mac menu bar. The eyes would follow the mouse around and blink if you clicked on them.

Well this was too much for one Art teacher who stopped by the lab one day to type something. She was in hysterics because she thought the computer was looking at her. The head of the computer department had to calm her down. He wasn’t impressed.

[MultimediaMan]

Well Avocent's KVMs can do such a thing, but they are ~2000USD apiece...