By Golly,
I looked at my old nVidia motherboard, and some of the holes DO have traces. Big ones, that go to the stuff on the back panel, like the mouse, keyboard, audio, etc.
Hmmm...
background noise
Re: background noise
On the subject of components & peripherals leaking into ground:
http://www.itworld.com/security/64193/r ... s-thin-air
http://www.itworld.com/security/64193/r ... s-thin-air
"We discovered four different ways to recover the keystroke of a keyboard," said Matin Vuagnoux, a Ph.D. student at the university. With the keyboard's cabling and nearby power wires acting as antennas for these electromagnetic signals, the researchers were able to read keystrokes with 95 percent accuracy over a distance of up to 20 meters (22 yards), in ideal conditions.
The researchers found a way to sniff USB keyboards, but older PS/2 keyboards, which have ground wires that connect right into the electric grid, were the best.
The article mostly mentions keyboards, but there's been discussion about the square-wav signalling heard as a mouse moves in this thread and I think the parallels are a reasonable assumption.On these keyboards, "the data cable is so close to the ground cable, the emanations from the data cable leak onto the ground cable, which acts as an antenna," Barisani said.
That ground wire passes through the PC and into the building's power wires, where the researchers can pick up the signals using a computer, an oscilloscope and about $500 worth of other equipment. They believe they could pick up signals from a distance of up to 50 meters by simply plugging a keystroke-sniffing device into the power grid somewhere close to the PC they want to snoop on.