Apparently optical gaming mice can spy on what we're saying and video games are an 'ideal target'

Mic-E-Mouse Pipeline Demonstration - ACSAC 2025 - YouTube

Great, now in addition to putting Sellotape over my webcam, tissue paper in my keyholes, and tin foil over my head, I'm going to have to whisper quietly around my gaming mouse. That's because, according to some researchers (via Igor's Lab) our optical gaming mice might be able to spy on what we're saying.

Apparently this method of snooping can be performed on "consumer-grade mice with high-fidelity sensors", which sounds a lot like "gaming mouse" to me. That does seem to be exactly the case, as in the full paper (pdf warning) we can see the researchers used a Razer Viper at 8 kHz polling to train the models used for this attack.

I suppose one of the key requirements is a high polling rate, as a higher polling rate means more data, which means more accurate data clean-up to isolate acoustics, ie, speech: "Attackers can exploit these sensors’ ever-increasing polling rate and sensitivity to emulate a makeshift microphone and covertly eavesdrop on unsuspecting users."

A visual representation of the de-noising process of optical gaming mouse data to result in isolated speech that the mouse picked up — (Image credit: Mic-E Mouse @ YouTube, Fakih et. al.)

The researchers also point out that "creative software, video games, and other high performance, low latency software are ideal targets for injecting our exploit." Video games in particular are "ideal targets" because many of them "contain networking code that can be reused by our exploit without raising suspicion. Thus, using a video game as the delivery vehicle of our exploit allows us to meet the performance demands of our collection scheme."

However, it looks like the mouse might need to be on a hard, flat surface, and also remain still, for the data to be cleaned well enough to get any speech out of it. So I doubt you'd have to worry while running around in Battlefield 6. Sitting still on bomb site B, defending the entrance to Tunnels on Dust 2, might be another story, though.

Perhaps more than anything this is just another reason to keep our polling rates to 2 kHz or lower. All it does is drain your battery anyway, as you won't be able to notice the difference by bumping the polling much higher than this.

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Jacob got his hands on a gaming PC for the first time when he was about 12 years old. He swiftly realised the local PC repair store had ripped him off with his build and vowed never to let another soul build his rig again. With this vow, Jacob the hardware junkie was born. Since then, Jacob's led a double-life as part-hardware geek, part-philosophy nerd, first working as a Hardware Writer for PCGamesN in 2020, then working towards a PhD in Philosophy for a few years while freelancing on the side for sites such as TechRadar, Pocket-lint, and yours truly, PC Gamer. Eventually, he gave up the ruthless mercenary life to join the world's #1 PC Gaming site full-time. It's definitely not an ego thing, he assures us.

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