Air-gapped computers (isolated from the Internet or other networks) are the most secure computers on the planet. But because of that they are also a big target.
Now a team of from the Ben-Gurion University in Israel has find a way to extract information from air-gapped computers by using radio frequency transmissions from USB connectors. And this is all without special hardware .
This is even better than what we saw in Mr. Robot.Because no special USB device needs to be smuggled in. This was the case with CottonMouth (known from the Snowden files) and the device used in the Mr. Robot series. Since it uses the USB's internal data bus for sending information there is no need for it.
It works like this:
USBee (that is the name of the malware) turns the computer's USB ports into a mini Radio (RF) transmitter. It does so by modulating the data fed at high-speed to plugged-in devices.
It will send strings of 0 bits to the USB port in such away that the device generate detectable noise. This is in the range of 240MHz and 480MHz.
Now this line is set they can send '0' and '1', The voltage will change and so will the frequence change. They use(B-FSK) to encode useful data.
There are some requirements that needs to be met to let this work.
The computer must be infected with the malware.
A USB device must be plugged in.
The attacker needs to be close to the device (that sucks a little). This must between 3-5 meters.
EDIT: http://thehackernews.com/2016/09/usbee-airgap-computer.html