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A team of Researchers from the University of California, Irvine have uncovered a surprising new security risk hiding in plain sight: high-end computer mice can be used to listen in on conversations.
In a proof-of-concept called Mic-E-Mouse, the team showed that premium optical mice — the kind popular with gamers and creative professionals — can pick up tiny desk vibrations caused by nearby speech. Those vibrations, captured by the mouse’s ultra-sensitive sensor, can then be processed and turned back into recognizable audio.
The method works because of how precise modern mice have become. Many now feature sensors with resolutions around 20,000 DPI and polling rates of 1,000Hz or more. This makes them extremely responsive — not just to hand movements, but to micro-vibrations in the surface below them.
When someone speaks near a desk, the sound waves create small, rapid movements in the tabletop. These get picked up by the mouse’s optical sensor, which is designed to detect the slightest motion. The captured data is then fed into software that filters out noise and runs it through a neural network trained to recognize speech patterns.
In tests, the system was able to reconstruct intelligible phrases from raw motion data, reaching up to 61% word accuracy.
What makes this particularly concerning is that the data collection is silent and invisible to the user. Any application with access to high-frequency mouse input — like a video game or design tool — could theoretically be exploited to record and transmit those signals without raising suspicion.
The hardware needed isn’t exotic, either. Many off-the-shelf mice already meet the technical requirements.
As the researchers point out, the more widely these mice are used — in homes, offices, and government settings — the larger the potential attack surface becomes.
While this isn’t an active threat yet, it opens the door to a new class of side-channel attacks that blend physical acoustics with digital espionage — all through a device no one thinks twice about.
