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Spoofing cyberattack can make cameras see things that aren’t there

A targeted transmission of radio waves can disrupt what a camera detects – and the technology has the potential to fool object-detection systems into seeing things that aren’t there

By David Hambling

26 September 2022

A postprocessed version of a photo that has been made blurry by a signal injection attack

This image was produced by using radio waves to inject words and a picture of the skyline of Nagasaki, Japan, into a camera frame that would otherwise have been black

Sebastian Köhler et al.

A cyberattack that uses radio waves to fool image-recognition systems can stop them working. So far, it can disrupt a barcode scanner and alter frames captured by cameras, but there is the potential for it to also work on other types of digital detection systems and make them see things that aren’t there.

Digital cameras contain sensors that convert light into electrical pulses. Additional…

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