Afraid of mice? Either kind. There’s the cheese-eating kind, which I guess are kind of dirty and wriggly, although cute. Then there’s the electronic mouse you use with your computer. Turns out you might have a reason to fear the latter now, too, since hackers have figured out a way to use them to record you speaking without your knowing.Yes, I know they don’t put microphones in mice. The way in which it picks up voices is fairly clever. So to hell with those people who told you to buy a gaming mouse, even if you don’t game. To hell, I say. Whoever those people were. Anyway, this exploit? They call it Mic-E-Mouse, which is pretty clever, if we’re being honest.demonstration of mic-e-mouseI spy a little (gaming) mouseYou know those spy movies where Team Blue (‘Murica) calmly sets up shop on the roof or balcony of a high-rise building, yanks something from a bag, and aims it across the cityscape at the window of another high-rise, in which the spy for Team Red (practically everyone, these days) is talking?The device aimed at the window plays a live recording of what’s being said in that room, alllll that distance away. As Team Blue smugly explains, the device reads the vibrations of the window caused by the voices inside and then translates them to speech.That’s more or less what’s happening with Mic-E-Mouse. TweakTown called attention to a paper, authored by University of California researchers, that describes how it works.High-sensitivity gaming mice are prized among gamers playing fast-paced games because they’re capable of picking up the slightest of hand movements, which means speed and precision.With Mic-E-Mouse, the hacked mouse picks up vibrations from the desk in the room where the target is speaking, like our spy scenario with the skyscraper windows. The vibrations are fed into a signal processing system, after which AI takes a pass at it to clean it up.It’s not perfect, but it’s accurate enough to be worrisome.The post Your Gaming Mouse Is Spying on You appeared first on VICE.