No surprise there - Microsoft confirms Vista speech recognition flaw:

In order for an attack to be successful, the user would have to have a microphone and speakers connected to their system. In addition, the user would have had to configure the speech recognition feature. The attackers’ audio file would then issue verbal commands via the systems speakers that could potentially be carried out by the speech recognition feature. Based on the initial investigation, Microsoft recommends customers take the following action to protect themselves from potential exploitation of the reported vulnerability:

• A user can turn off their computer speakers and/or microphone.
• If a user does run an audio file that attempts to execute commands on their system, they should close the Windows Media Player, turn off speech recognition and restart their computer.

Microsoft will continue its investigation and will provide additional guidance and mitigation to further help protect customers as necessary. Upon completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take further action to help protect our customers.

My ZDNet blogging colleague George Ou has been doing some investigating into this flaw.  Here's what he came up with:

I've also done some further experimentation that this exploit can be very nasty even if it can't execute with administrative privileges or bypass UAC.  I have verified that I can create a sound file that can wake Vista speech recognition, open Windows Explorer, delete the documents folder, and then empty the trash.  Then we have to consider the fact that people do leave many webpages open over night and some of those may have rotating flash ads that can play sounds.  If that's not a serious exploit, I don't know what is.

I don't see this has a huge risk because Vista isn't widespread and even fewer people will use speech recognition, but it's one worth bearing in mind.  If you're concerned, disable speech recognition.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 12:46 and is filed under Stay Secure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.