New Hack Attack Slows Internet Speed To See What Videos You Watch


A new method of spying on any user, device, or internet connection has been revealed by security researchers from the Graz University of Technology. The researchers have developed a technique called SnailLoad, which can accurately determine the video a person is watching with a success rate of up to 98%. This method can also identify the websites being visited, although with a lower success rate of 63%. What’s particularly worrisome is that the only known way to mitigate this is by degrading internet connection speed through the addition of ‘noise’.

SnailLoad Side-Channel Privacy Attack Explained

In their paper, SnailLoad: Exploiting Remote Network Latency Measurements without JavaScript, researchers Stefan Gast, Roland Czerny, Jonas Juffinger, Fabian Rauscher, Simone Franza, and Daniel Gruss, explain how this new eavesdropping method without installing malware, and without observing network traffic through some kind of person-in the-middle attack. Indeed, an attacker doesn’t even need to by close physical proximity to monitor Wi-Fi packets.

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Instead, SnailLoad ingeniously exploits bandwidth bottlenecks in the proximity of the device you are using. This is described as being the “subtle variations in the round-trip times of network packets” carrying a side-channel signal that is influenced by the activity of the victim. To put it more simply, by getting the targeted user to download a small file, it could be any kind of content including an advert, font or image, the attacker can measure the latency, the changes in the speed of an internet connection, to deduce the activity they are engaged in. Speed is the key, or rather slowness of speed. That file is downloaded from a server using a slow connection so that this latency pattern can be monitored. The fact that the file is sent at a snail’s pace gives rise to the name of the attack. “Apart from being slow,” the researchers said, “SnailLoad, just like a snail, leaves traces and is a little bit creepy.”

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