Can your mouse spy on you? Research shows a high-sensitivity gaming mouse can pick up your speech with a malicious AI-driven trick (www.techradar.com)

Researchers from the University of California have demonstrated "Mic-E-Mouse," a proof-of-concept attack that turns high‑sensitivity gaming mice into improvised microphones. The exploit records tiny acoustic vibrations transmitted through a desk surface via the mouse’s optical sensor (research cites devices with DPI above ~20,000). Raw vibration signals are weak and noisy, but the team applies Wiener filtering to denoise and then uses AI-based enhancement to reconstruct intelligible speech; a demo yields heavily digitized but comprehensible audio and a reported speaker-recognition accuracy around 80%. This is significant because it widens the threat model for side‑channel eavesdropping: commodity peripherals can be repurposed for surveillance if an attacker can install malware (native or web‑delivered) on the target PC. Key technical implications include how high-resolution motion sensors can capture non-motion signals, the effectiveness of classical signal processing plus modern ML to extract information from low‑SNR data, and remaining unknowns (e.g., mousepad thickness effects). Practically, the attack isn’t turnkey for mass surveillance yet—it requires a compromised host and specific hardware—but it highlights a growing attack surface and the need for endpoint protections, supply-chain/device vetting, and hardware/software mitigations to prevent peripheral sensors being abused.