Be careful who your Vista PC talks to

Darius Chang | Feb 02, 2007

Unlike plants, having someone talk to your Vista PC may not be good for your system's health as you might just find yourself missing a few files.

Due to the new operating system's voice recognition technology, some people have discovered that an MP3 playback could be used to command the PC to delete files and empty the recycle bin. These malicious commands can be embedded in emails or tagged to Web sites, resulting in unrecoverable data.

The defense, it seems, would be to place the microphone away from the speakers so the resulting audio will not be clear enough to trigger the commands. Alternatively, one could disable the voice recognition function to prevent such attacks. To date, there have been no major incidences resulting from this quirk, though some Vista users were able to intentionally replicate the effect on their PCs.