Over the years many weird, shocking, and sometimes crazy studies about video games have come out, but this one is really something. According to University of California, high-end mice can be repurposed to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
According to researchers, high-end gaming mice, the kind prized for ultra-precise sensors and lightning-fast polling rates, can be repurposed as makeshift microphones capable of recording nearby conversations.
Yep! Gaming mice could be listening to your racist, sexist rants in Call of Duty.
The research, nicknamed “Mic-E-Mouse” (short for Microphone Exploit on Mouse), demonstrates how modern optical sensors inside gaming mice can pick up subtle vibrations caused by human speech.
The audio travels through the desk and those vibrations reach the mouse’s sensor. And if someone has the right software installed on your laptop or PC, they can reconstruct the audio vibrations into intelligible audio. Truly a dystopian situation!
The UCI team trained machine-learning models to analyze raw sensor data from popular gaming mice. Their results? Up to 61% accuracy in reconstructing spoken words. The result was good enough to understand key phrases, names, and even passwords in controlled test in UCI.
This is a scary thing because hackers won’t need to turn on your webcam or mics. Instead, they can exploit legitimate mouse data, the same data gamers and drivers already use for tracking. If a malicious app gets access to your data stream, well, you’re cooked.
It can secretly record surface vibrations and feed them through an AI model to recreate nearby speech.
A normal-looking gaming app could, in theory, spy on you through your mouse movements. The vulnerability primarily affects high-DPI mice (above 4,000 DPI) and models with polling rates of 1,000 Hz or higher, commonly found in brands like Razer, Logitech, Corsair, and SteelSeries.
