Bitcoin Forum

as we know the latest malware and virus (e.g. BadBIOS) hack your computers and steal your data by travelling through computer speakers, thus jumping over air-gap protection.

how do i protect my bitcoin wallet from these threats?

tin foil hats...
well either that or a sound proof room
who needs sound anyway

BadBIOS can only communicate via speakers if both machines are already infected. Infecting a clean machine via sound-waves is still far too sci-fi to worry about.

You can't.

The Newluminati reptiles can take your cryptoez by thought any time they want.

Nah I'm only kidding. Just shell out for a few metres of this stuff:

http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2008/11/most-expensive-speaker-cable-world-audioquest-audiophile/ (http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2008/11/most-expensive-speaker-cable-world-audioquest-audiophile/)

And place your speakers on the OUTSIDE of your house.

Works a charm.

If you are that worried about it, there are still several options.

1) use wallpaper that blocks electromagnetic waves (yes they exists), throughout the room your computer is in, or even your entire house. (Note, this may mess up your wifi, and should mess up radio and mobile phones)

2) generate a wallet from several strings of data that are each randomly generated, using different computers and physical objects, and concatenate the strings on a piece of paper.

Probably much more options.

^^

Sound isn't an electromagnetic wave.

You can swallow the usb with your wallet on, or stick it up your arse. This will protect against soundtheives.

Remove the cold storage computer's speakers, microphone, and sound card.

Who's we?, we the stupid people we?. What you describe is impossible, period.
Communication through sound between two devices would only work if both had speaker and mic and both had specific installed software running and it would have to be in freq range both speaker and mic could emit and detect (ie audible to humans given poor freq range of most computer speakers and mics) and even then it would be rather unreliable.

No, we don't know that.  The BIOS dumps that were provided by the researcher claiming to have found BadBIOS have been analysed by lots of researchers and not a single one has been able to validate the existence of Ruiu's BadBIOS malware.  Hardware and BIOS experts have weighed in, in addition to most of the heavyweights in security research.  And...Nothing.

But, whatever, if you're really worried about air-gap jumping BIOS malware that traverses airgaps using sound, then there's an obvious solution:  Don't attach a mic to the offline system.  

What you should actually be worried about is malware that can hitch a ride on USB sticks, because those are actually known to exist.

soon it will be computer viruses transmitted by STD's and we all know how that will happen  ;)

It doesn't exist.  Nothing to worry about.

Badbios was fake