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February 1, 2007

Vista Lets People Whisper Sweet Deletes

Sorry, but I love this story: Apparently Microsoft's Windows Vista has a huge speech recognition security hole whereby you email it MP3s that ask it to delete files, empty the trash, and so on. There's productivity for you, because that is a hell of a lot easier than actually showing up and Captain Kirk-style telling a computer to lobotomize itself.

The exploit scenario would involve the speech recognition feature picking up commands through the microphone such as “copy”, “delete”, ”shutdown”, etc. and acting on them. These commands would be coming from an audio file that is being played through the speakers. Of course this would be heard and the actions taken would be visible to the user if they were in front of the PC during the attempted exploitation.

[via Technet]

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