Creating Wireless Signals with Ethernet Cable to Steal Data from Air-Gapped Systems

guest · Oct 5, 2021

Creating Wireless Signals with Ethernet Cable to Steal Data from Air-Gapped Systems
October 4, 2021
https://thehackernews.com/2021/10/creating-wireless-signals-with-ethernet.html

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.

"It's interesting that the wires that came to protect the air-gap become the vulnerability of the air gap in this attack," Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D in the Cyber Security Research Center in the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, told The Hacker News.
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. The transmitted signals can then be intercepted by a nearby software-defined radio (SDR) receiver wirelessly, decode the data, and send it to an attacker who is in an adjacent room.

"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."
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As countermeasures, the researchers propose prohibiting the use of radio receivers in and around air-gapped networks and monitoring the network interface card link layer activity for any covert channel, as well as jamming the signals, and using metal shielding to limit electromagnetic fields from interfering with or emanating from the shielded wires.

"This paper shows that attackers can exploit the Ethernet cables to exfiltrate data from air-gapped networks," the researchers said in the paper.
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arXiv: LANTENNA: Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Networks via Ethernet Cables

Air-gapped networks are wired with Ethernet cables since wireless connections are strictly prohibited.

In this paper we present LANTENNA - a new type of electromagnetic attack allowing adversaries to leak sensitive data from isolated, air-gapped networks. Malicious code in air-gapped computers gathers sensitive data and then encodes it over radio waves emanating from the Ethernet cables, using them as antennas
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Creating Wireless Signals with Ethernet Cable to Steal Data from Air-Gapped Systems

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