Order of the Bath

This is a problem a colleague at work came across with a home machine. His wife said that suddenly strange words started appearing on the screen. Suspecting some virus she disconnected the network immediately and called her husband. When he tried to use a bootable Linux CD to investigate the problem he had trouble closing down because windows were being selected randomly. Resorting to the kill button (hold down the power button for a while) he rebooted but strange words started to appear during the boot sequence as well.

What is your diagnosis?

He first suspected a BIOS virus but those haven’t been seen since the late ’90s. Then he spotted that one of the words showing up was the name of a neighbour’s child. Light dawns! A chat with the neighbour revealed that they had just replaced the battery in their wireless keyboard and the extra power must have been sufficient to be picked up by the identical receiver on his wife’s PC.

The implications are left as an exercise for the reader.

Thanks to Frank and his (internal) blog for the details.

This entry was posted on 14 Feb 2008 at 09:28 by Rick and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.