Well you’ve heard all the great new features of Vista. Aero, Ultimate Extras, Speech Recognition…. There’s no doubt that there will be bugs and security holes but it looks like we’ve found the first one!

Apparently, hackers can take advantage of the new “Speech Recognition” software hard coded into Windows Vista to delete files, shut down your PC or even allow backholes to be uncovered. But how?

Blogger George Ou reported to ZD Net that the flaw was in fact attacked at by playing an audio clip in the speakers that will in turn go through your microphone and tell the PC to do whatever the audio clip says to do.

So in such a case it is possible to delete important documents and empty the trash, which in turn will make them non-recoverable. Microsoft however don’t seem to think this is such an issue after all.

The exploit scenario would involve the speech recognition feature picking up commands through the microphone such as ‘copy’, ‘delete’, ’shutdown’, etc. and acting on them; Microsoft Security Research Blogger

But will this flaw be fixable? How do you think users can be protected? Post your comments below!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.