MX Has a Story to Tell: Hacking MX Records for Fun, Profit and Data
Dylan
BSides Seattle 2026 · Day 2 · Track 1
Dylan, an offensive security practitioner based in Seattle, presents original research on exploiting electromagnetic emanations from LCD monitors to exfiltrate data from air-gapped networks. Building on the NSA's classified **TEMPEST** program and decades of academic research on CRT monitors, Dylan demonstrates that modern LCD displays -- long believed to be safe from this class of attack -- are vulnerable through their HDMI and DVI cable connectors, which leak sufficient electromagnetic radiation to transmit encoded data.
AI review
A competent reproduction and extension of TEMPEST-class emanation attacks applied to LCD monitors via DVI cable leakage. Dylan demonstrates a working proof of concept with commodity hardware under $100, proving that air-gap exfiltration through LCD monitors is practical despite the prevailing assumption that LCDs are safe from this attack class. The research is real but not deeply novel -- it builds incrementally on decades of well-documented TEMPEST research.