Security News > 2021 > October > Creating Wireless Signals with Ethernet Cable to Steal Data from Air-Gapped Systems
A newly discovered data exfiltration mechanism employs Ethernet cables as a "Transmitting antenna" to stealthily siphon highly-sensitive data from air-gapped systems, according to the latest research.
Dubbed "LANtenna Attack," the novel technique enables malicious code in air-gapped computers to amass sensitive data and then encode it over radio waves emanating from Ethernet cables just as if they are antennas.
"Notably, the malicious code can run in an ordinary user-mode process and successfully operate from within a virtual machine," the researchers noted in an accompanying paper titled "LANTENNA: Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Networks via Ethernet Cables."
The LANtenna attack is no different in that it works by using the malware in the air-gapped workstation to induce the Ethernet cable to generate electromagnetic emissions in the frequency bands of 125 MHz that are then modulated and intercepted by a nearby radio receiver.
In a proof-of-concept demo, data transmitted from an air-gapped computer through its Ethernet cable was received at a distance of 200 cm apart.
"This paper shows that attackers can exploit the Ethernet cables to exfiltrate data from air-gapped networks," the researchers said in the paper.