Hackers used an EEG game controller to determine bank info and PIN numbers by reading brain waves.


Security researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Geneva, and the University of California, Berkeley created a program designed to find sensitive data, such as the location of your home, your debit card PIN, which bank you use, and your date of birth, using a $300 consumer EEG designed as a brain-computer interface for game playing and sold to consumers by companies such as Emotiv Systems and Neurosky.

To extract information the researchers rely on the P300 response — a very specific brainwave pattern that occurs when you recognize something you have seen before, or that is meaningful, or when you recognize something that fits your current task.

The program flashed pictures of maps, banks, and card PINs on the computer screen and recorded the P300 responses.

It would be easy for hackers to design a game using this method to extract sensitive information from your brain, without your knowledge, while you are playing.

Read the original research paper, On the Feasibility of Side-Channel Attacks with Brain-Computer Interfaces [pdf].

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