"Virtual Reality Headsets Are Vulnerable to Hackers"

According to computer scientists at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), the headset hardware and virtual keyboard interfaces associated with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) present new opportunities for hackers. The metaverse technology, currently being developed by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and other technology giants, relies on headsets that interpret bodily motions, including reaches, nods, steps, and blinks, to navigate new AR and VR worlds in order to play games, socialize, shop, and more. A computer science team at UCR's Bourns College of Engineering led by professors Jiasi Chen and Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, has demonstrated that spyware can monitor and record a user's every movement and then use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to translate those motions into words with accuracy of at least 90 percent. They showed that if a user runs multiple applications, and one of them is malicious, it can spy on the other applications. It can spy on the environment around a user to see whether people are around them and how far they are. It can also expose the user's interactions with the headset to the attacker. For example, if a user pauses a virtual game to check Facebook messages by air-typing the password on a virtual keyboard generated by the headset, the spyware could capture the password. Similarly, attackers could interpret the user's body movements to access their actions during a virtual meeting where sensitive information is disclosed and discussed. This article continues to discuss the study on the hacking opportunities created by headset hardware and virtual keyboard interfaces associated with AR and VR. 

The University of California, Riverside reports "Virtual Reality Headsets Are Vulnerable to Hackers"