A novel data exfiltration technique has been found to leverage a covert ultrasonic channel to leak sensitive information from isolated, air-gapped computers to a nearby smartphone that doesn’t even require a microphone to pick up the sound waves.
Dubbed GAIROSCOPE, the adversarial model is the latest addition to a long list of acoustic, electromagnetic, optical, and thermal approaches devised by Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D in the Cyber Security Research Center in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
Air-gapping is seen as an essential security countermeasure that involves isolating a computer or network and preventing it from establishing an external connection, effectively creating an impenetrable barrier between a digital asset and threat actors who try to forge a path for espionage attacks.
Like other attacks against air-gapped networks, GAIROSCOPE is no different in that it banks on the ability of an adversary to breach a target environment via ploys such as infected USB sticks, watering holes, or supply chain compromises to deliver the malware.
What’s new this time around is that it also requires infecting the smartphones of employees working in the victim organization with a rogue app that, for its part, is deployed by means of attack vectors like social engineering, malicious ads, or compromised websites, among others.
