An adversary can leverage a computer's peripheral devices (e.g., microphones and webcams) or applications (e.g., voice and video call services) to capture audio recordings for the purpose of listening into sensitive conversations to gather information.(Citation: ESET Attor Oct 2019) Malware or scripts may be used to interact with the devices through an available API provided by the operating system or an application to capture audio. Audio files may be written to disk and exfiltrated later.
Processes accessing ALSA/PulseAudio devices or executing audio capture binaries like 'arecord', followed by file creation or suspicious child process spawning.
Unusual or unauthorized processes accessing microphone APIs (e.g., winmm.dll, avrt.dll) followed by audio file writes to user-accessible or temp directories.
Processes invoking AVFoundation or CoreAudio frameworks, accessing input devices via TCC logs or Unified Logs, followed by writing AIFF/WAV/MP3 files to disk.