Criminals could pick up your voice through a foot-thick concrete wall, thanks to AI and a flaw in popular laptop microphones - here's what you need to know

• AI can now reconstruct speech through concrete using just a laptop’s unshielded microphone wiring
• Laptop mic cables double as antennas, leaking audio through radio harmonics
• MEMS microphones emit signals that betray private conversations without any system compromise or malware

A new form of eavesdropping uses artificial intelligence to recover speech from devices through walls.

A report by eeNews outline how it exploits a vulnerability in widely used MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) microphones, and the most affected devices are laptops, due in part to their internal wiring design.

Researchers from the University of Florida and Japan’s University of Electro-Communications demonstrated even through a 25 cm concrete barrier, attackers can accurately reconstruct speech using nothing more than an FM receiver, a copper antenna, and machine learning tools.