Malware Lets a Drone Steal Data by Watching a Computer's Blinking LED

A few hours after dark one evening earlier this month, a small quadcopter drone lifted off from the parking lot of Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel. It soon trained its built-in camera on its target, a desktop computer's tiny blinking light inside a third-floor office nearby. The pinpoint flickers, emitting from the LED hard drive indicator that lights up intermittently on practically every modern Windows machine, would hardly arouse the suspicions of anyone working in the office after hours. But in fact, that LED was silently winking out an optical stream of the computer's secrets to the camera floating outside. That data-stealing drone, shown in the video below, works as a Mr. Robot-style demonstration of a very real espionage technique.