Security News > 2022 > July > New Air-Gap Attack Uses SATA Cable as an Antenna to Transfer Radio Signals

A new method devised to leak information and jump over air-gaps takes advantage of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment or Serial ATA cables as a communication medium, adding to a long list of electromagnetic, magnetic, electric, optical, and acoustic methods already demonstrated to plunder data.

"Although air-gap computers have no wireless connectivity, we show that attackers can use the SATA cable as a wireless antenna to transfer radio signals at the 6GHz frequency band," Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D in the Cyber Security Research Center in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, wrote in a paper published last week.

Put simply, the goal is to use the SATA cable as a covert channel to emanate electromagnetic signals and transfer a brief amount of sensitive information from highly secured, air-gapped computers wirelessly to a nearby receiver more than 1m away.

Serial ATA is a bus interface and an Integrated Drive Electronics standard that's used to transfer data at higher rates to mass storage devices.

For an adversary whose aim is to steal confidential information, financial data, and intellectual property, the initial penetration is only the start of the attack chain that's followed by reconnaissance, data gathering, and data exfiltration through workstations that contain active SATA interfaces.

In the final data reception phase, the transmitted data is captured through a hidden receiver or relies on a malicious insider in an organization to carry a radio receiver near the air-gapped system.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/07/new-air-gap-attack-uses-sata-cable-as.html