American cybersecurity experts from the University of Chicago have found a vulnerability in virtual reality (VR) devices that allows hackers to access personal information without users’ knowledge. The study was published on: portal scientific publications arXiv.
The cyber attack was named “Inception layer” in honor of Christopher Nolan’s thriller “Inception”, where agents enter a person’s dream and introduce an idea into their consciousness, which the target begins to think of as their own thought.
The method involves loading a fake application onto the VR headset that simulates a basic virtual reality environment or an official program. Using this program, hackers can access the victim’s money transfers, monitor his communication with other people in virtual chat, and obtain other information that the person enters at the “initial layer”.
As experiments showed, only 10 out of 28 volunteers suspected a problem when using the VR helmet. When you are in virtual reality, a hacker attack can be noticed by the slight flickering of the image that appears in the field of view.
Hackers could do this before to steal Someone else’s Tesla electric car using cheap radio devices.