hacking lcd displays brands

Hackaday’s own [Arsenijs Picugins] has been rather busy hacking old laptops apart and learning what can and cannot be easily reused, and presents for the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon, a heavily meme-loaded presentation with some very practical advice.

What parts inside a dead laptop are worth keeping? Aside from removable items like RAM stick and hard drives, the most obvious first target is the LCD panel. These are surprisingly easy to use, with driver boards available on the usual marketplaces, so long as you make sure to check the exact model number of your panel is supported.

Thus, say you have a 128x64 STN LCD, you might accidentally try to drive it with a 64x64 input signal, and... in most cases I"ve run into it"ll work. The image will be displayed at the left, and the right 64x64 pixels will display whatever garbage was in those registers from power-on/reset (and if you believe the hype, those liquid crystals might get unhappy with DC... but, I"m not sure about that, since the AC waveform is separate from the shift-register loading).

The latter is something I"d been trying to figure out for some time, two displays on a lappy from the single display"s input. I don"t know why, but my brain was stuck this whole time in trying to use the regular input signals, rather than tapping to/from the panels themselves.

Or maybe you dug out a groovy old stencilled LCD from an old lappy with a HD activity indicator, battery indicator, etc. and want to mount it next to the display. Or even a VFD for such things.... oooohhhh....

Luckily, all the digital devices in his 2012 Hyundai Genesis Coupe were connected using a fairly common standard — the “Controller Area Network bus” (or CAN bus). So Harin grabbed one of his Arduino’s — plus a cheap SPI CANBUS circuit board — and just started doing some experiments. When he first installed his Arduino circuit board into the dashboard, the LCD began showing the time of day — every ten milliseconds — and any new messages that he sent to the screen were simply being wiped out when the system re-transmitted. But Harin had already built up a strong motivation to keep moving forward, according to a recent write-up in Make: magazine, because “I hated that stupid little blue LCD. It would just sit there staring at me brightly with the words ‘AUX’…”

So he re-routed the LCD’s input. And fortunately, Harin’s other Raspberry Pi board could accommodate a WiFi dongle. By using an iPhone for connectivity, it was now able to draw down the funny Reddit quotes. And Make: also reported that his next project may be to install a router directly into his car.

Harin’s even mounted his Nexus 7 Android tablet into his car’s dashboard and is using it to play music. In the comments on his blog, he talks about one day transmitting the “now playing” information from the tablet to the LCD. Somewhere in the mix, there’s even an SQL database. “My main script retrieves the top post from Shower Thoughts and converts the characters to their hexadecimal equivalents, adds the message ID and row identifier, and stores it in an SQL database.”

There’re two more scripts just for retrieving the quote from the database and display it on the screen, which Harin says will be building blocks for more features down the road. “Eventually, I’ll be able to screen the messages intended for the LCD on the primary [CAN bus] network and add the ones I want to keep to the SQL database while removing the ones I don’t need anymore.”

It"s pretty easy to do and only requires basic tools like scissors and an X-Acto knife. You can order the polarized filter online and just use an old LCD monitor you have lying around.

The team was lead by Ang Cui, the chief scientist at Red Balloon Security, which presented the technique at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas on Friday along with his colleagues.

The expert highlighted that the attack is not so fast because images are slow to load, anyway such kind of hack could be effective against displays that are mostly statics, the control console of an ICS system.

After two years of research and reverse engineering, working on the processor that controls the monitor and its firmware, Red Balloon Security researchers figured out how to hack a monitor without hacking the computer to which it is connected.

Those concerns are real, and so is the danger. How much information could an identity thief learn just by sitting next to you as you use your laptop? “Visual hacking” is easy, successful, and more common than you realize.

3M sponsored The Global Visual Hacking Experiment, a study conducted by Ponemon Institute on visual hacking in the United States, followed by an expanded global experiment. You can read a 19-page PDF summary of the results here.

After two years of research and reverse engineering, working on the processor that controls the monitor and its firmware, Red Balloon Security researchers figured out how to hack a monitor without hacking the computer to which it is connected.

Those concerns are real, and so is the danger. How much information could an identity thief learn just by sitting next to you as you use your laptop? “Visual hacking” is easy, successful, and more common than you realize.

3M sponsored The Global Visual Hacking Experiment, a study conducted by Ponemon Institute on visual hacking in the United States, followed by an expanded global experiment. You can read a 19-page PDF summary of the results here.

While the scenario above greatly reduces hacking risks, as long as your router and WiFi network are secured, connecting your baby monitor to an internet service is a very different story.

We think of our monitors as passive entities. The computer sends them data, and they somehow—magically?—turn it into pixels which make words and pictures.But what if that wasn"t the case? What if hackers could hijack our monitors and turn them against us?As it turns out, that"s possible. A group of researchers has found a way to hack directly into the tiny computer that controls your monitor without getting into your actual computer, and both see the pixels displayed on the monitor—effectively spying on you—and also manipulate the pixels to display different images.Advertisement"We can now hack the monitor and you shouldn"t have blind trust in those pixels coming out of your monitor," Ang Cui, the lead researcher who come up with this ingenious hack, told me earlier this week."You shouldn"t have blind trust in those pixels coming out of your monitor."Cui, the chief scientist at Red Balloon Security and a recent PhD graduate from Columbia University, presented his findings at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas on Friday along with Jatin Kataria and other colleagues.During a demo at the Red Balloon offices in New York City earlier this week, Cui and his colleagues showed me how the hack works. Essentially, if a hacker can get you to visit a malicious website or click on a phishing link, they can then target the monitor"s embedded computer, specifically its firmware. This is the computer that controls the menu to change brightness and other simple settings on the monitor.The hacker can then put an implant there programmed to wait for further instructions. Then, the way the hacker can communicate with the implant is rather shrewd. The implant can be programmed to wait for commands sent over by a blinking pixel, which could be included in any video or a website. Essentially, that pixel is uploading code to the monitor. At that point, the hacker can mess with your monitor.In practice, Cui said this could be used to both spy on you, but also show you stuff that"s actually not there. A scenario where that could dangerous is if hackers mess with the monitor displaying controls for a power plant, perhaps faking an emergency.Advertisement"If you have a monitor, chances are your monitor is affected.""Can I get you to shut down the power plant?" Cui asked rhetorically, with a sly smile. "I can do that."The researchers warn that this is an issue that could potentially affect one billion monitors, given that the most common brands all have processors that are vulnerable."If you have a monitor, chances are your monitor is affected," Cui, who last year showed how to turn printers into bugging devices, told me.The attack, however, has a downside, images are slow to load, so it"s perhaps not the most effective way to manipulate things quickly on the victim"s computer. But that wouldn"t be an issue if hackers are targeting industrial control systems monitors, whose displays are mostly static.For Cui, in any case, the point of the research is to show that this is possible, and that we shouldn"t consider monitors as untouchable, unhackable things."We now live in a world where you can"t trust your monitor," Cui concluded.

All digital screen networks, including large LED screens, roadside informational displays and DOOH (digital out-of-home) systems are operated via computers and therefore are vulnerable to hackers’ attacks.

Illegal access to advertising screen networks, hacking of operational systems, substituting content – all this is can be qualified as an offence. But this is an offence that guarantees wide public attention and media coverage. In this respect hacker attacks maybe compared to a litmus test on efficiency and popularity of this or that computer solution. As we see, DOOH networks are not an exception. As DOOH systems are getting more and more wide-spread, this market segment is turning into an attractive target for hackers.

To prove the point we decided to list the most well-publicized cases of hacking attacks on informational and advertising networks starting with the latest:

July 2007. Sophia incident. The capital of Bulgaria was in the center of scandal when several large outdoor PDP displays installed in the downtown square turned the square into the adult theatre.

Screen privacy is a major concern when dealing with sensitive data, and it’s a problem we don’t think enough about. It is surprisingly easy to steal visible data with low-tech visual hacking techniques. Luckily, there are a number of actions you can take right away to resolve data vulnerabilities. Also, you’re not going to want to miss the deep dive into one of the most effective tools: privacy screens for your monitor.

Visual hacking has to be one of the lowest-tech ways to steal information. (It is only slightly more complex than just stealing a paper document off a table.) However, being simple doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. A shocking experiment by the Ponemon Institute (see here for more) showed just how vulnerable office environments are social engineering hacks, especially visual hacking.

At its simplest, visual hacking involves just seeing information on a screen and remembering it. Given the prevalence of smartphones, however, it’s not hard to snap a photo or record a video under the pretense of checking a text message. A pretense may not even be necessary. Are you really aware of what everyone is doing on their devices around you at any given time? Did you just look over your shoulder now?

There are plenty of solutions for reducing visual hacking and improving screen privacy. They vary in complexity and not all are universally applicable.

Use partitions or walls around screens. Open office floor plans make visual hacking much easier. Cubicles and offices make it much easier to keep visual data safe by blocking both displays and hard copies from view.

Turn screens away from public view. Whenever possible, keep your displays facing away from public thoroughfares and high-traffic areas to limit exposure.

Keep your desk clear of sensitive documents. Visual hacking targets more than just screens. It can also target paper documents and information. At a minimum, make sure any folders, documents, or notes containing sensitive information are put away.

Besides turning off your screen entirely, screen privacy through one of these monitor filters is one of the best ways to safeguard yourself from visual hacking.

Permanent adhesive is an option for use cases that always need extra protection from visual hacking and unwanted attention. Like a phone screen protector, this option is permanently glued to your display and cannot be removed or shared. However, it is a handy set-it-and-forget-it option.

Screens now play a leading role in every element of our lives from work to play. We have TV screens in our living rooms, monitors on our desks, and smartphones in our pockets. But we need to remember that our screens are mixed blessings. Without taking proper precautions, our displays represent real vulnerabilities for data theft.