http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article.jhtml?articleID=474623
Rampant cordless keyboard strikes again
Hewlett-Packard Norway will no longer guarantee their cordless keyboards for
security after yet another report that they transmit keystrokes far afield. This
time typing went astray in Oslo.
Ørjan Stokkeland (left) and Are Wormnes were, for all practical purposes,
using the same keyboard for a week.
PHOTO: PER KRISTIAN BJØRKENG
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Are Wormnes got a shock when his neighbor Ørjan Stokkeland rang him up and asked
him if he by any chance was writing a letter to telephone company Telenor.
Wormnes can be thankful for a considerate neighbor - everything he was typing on
his computer could have been read.
Last autumn a similar case made headlines. Two Stavanger men discovered they were
connected when a neighbor recognized a letter mysteriously appearing on his
machine to be emanating from his boss a few doors away.
Hewlett-Packard first claimed that this was a quirk, but replacement equipment
produced the same results, with information being directly transmitted to the
neighbor's computer, despite it being far out of advertised range and with
several walls between.
The latest case took place in Bestum, Oslo, and took about a week to clear up.
Stokkeland began noticing strange characters appearing on his screen.
Occasionally a new program would open, and text would suddenly appear in the
address field of his browser while he was online. He couldn't access his e-mail
because the wrong characters kept appearing in the password field.
"I was a bit worried about a virus, I was sure I had one. I deleted and
reinstalled my firewall but it didn't help. I couldn't understand what was going
on," Stokkeland said.
His neighbor Wormnes works from home, and spends a lot of his time typing at his
computer, causing Stokkeland almost constant problems.
"Finally I opened a Word document. There I saw the "virus" writing a letter to
Telenor complaining about a bill. When I saw the sender's address I understood
the connection. It's crazy. I could have just left the document open and read
everything he wrote," Stokkeland said.
Wormnes rang up HP and was told that "this kind of thing could happen".
Hewlett-Packard advised him to speak with all neighbors within a radius of 100
meters and switch his keyboard to a channel they weren't using.
"There must be 100 people in that area. It's impossible to talk with all of
them," Wormnes said, and that is not even the worst of it.
"If a neighbor wants to listen in, there is no way to stop them. I got a message
from HP that another alternative was "not to write any sensitive information". I
think that's horrible. In practice the product is useless. They sell it without
any mention of the danger," Wormnes said.
HP apologized via press spokesman Joakim Larsen for the advice to avoid writing
sensitive information.
"That just isn't adequate. It is also regrettable that he was told to arrange
channel selection with his neighbors. Those that have had this problem have
switched to our new model with 256 different channels and higher security. Each
time the computer is turned on the keyboard chooses a new channel at random. Then
it is not possible to monitor someone's computer all the time," Larsen said.
Larsen agreed that this did not prevent someone from intermittently reading what
was being written with the new keyboards.
"You won't be 100 percent safe with the new model either. If you want to be
completely sure that no one can see what you are writing then you should use a
keyboard with a cord," Larsen said.