[4502] in WWW Security List Archive
Re: ERM Surveillance Information
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christian Bojlesen)
Wed Feb 19 15:57:30 1997
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 11:57:58 -0700
To: jwp@checfs1.ucsd.edu, www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
From: Christian Bojlesen <bo4373ch@uscolo.edu>
Errors-To: owner-www-security@ns2.rutgers.edu
At 08:22 PM 2/18/97 -0800, jwp@checfs1.ucsd.edu wrote:
>Poke around in computer security on Yahoo for a while and you'll find
>a company based in NYC (I think) that claims to be able to do this.
>Personally, I doubt that it's possible in any significant sense.
Well I suggest you to think again. Van Eck devices are as real as anything
can get. There are companies currently spending money to
protect their computers from ERM surveillance. Security experts claim that
the FBI used it to catch Aldrich Ames.
>It'd be fairly easy to check, really. The first thing of interest is,
>under ideal conditions, how far away can you detect that the thing's
>turned on and drawing on the screen? [If detectable emissions exist at
>all, they'll come from the monitor.] Then you ask the same question
>when looking through walls, with a number of monitors in the room, and
>the fluorescent lights on, etc, etc. Good luck.
The original paper explaining how to use a TV to do the trick reported
that could pick up the signal from a distance of about 2 km. And that was
far from being a high-tech device.
Answering the second part of the question even if the fluorescent lights
were a major obstacle to the device (and they aren't so significant because
a Van Eck device pick up low-frequency harmonics from the monitors CRT),
and even with many monitors in the same room a lot of damage could be done
and you should know that (and that's not a problem either, it is possible
to pick up AND distinguish between computers from over a mile away). After
all sniffers don't pick up clean data, and yet everyone in this list knows
about the damage that they can do.
A Van Eck device can be bought by around $4000... There has been public
reports of the device being used against Chemical Bank in 1992... The FBI
public relations office has confirmed that they use "CRT microspies"... And
for heaven's sake there's a series of specifications (TEMPEST) by the
NSA for monitors that cannot be affected by ERM surveillance.
[]s
