BCI research is important work (see here). The availability of reasonably priced hardware and general purpose APIs has made it easy to investigate many aspects of how EEG processing of can be used to control the external environment.
The extrapolation of this work into the concept of mind reading software appears to be inevitable, but even after all these years, is still annoying. The latest incarnation of this is based on reputable work at Universities of Oxford and Geneva, and the University of California, Berkeley: Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data.
To start with, finding a correlation between P300 responses and a person's image recognition -- by 15% - 40% compared to random guessing -- isn't exactly earth shattering. Also, note that P300 is an average of multiple evoked responses. This requires many repetitions of the stimulus (16 times in this study) to reduce the noise enough and see the signal at all. As a practical matter, this is a really long way from brain malware.
Checkout Computers can read your mind. Still amazing!
UPDATE 8/21/12:
Here's the graphic from Hacking the Human Brain? Not As Impossible As You Think about the same research:
I didn't realize there was a whole website for "NEWS ABOUT BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACES (BCI), MIND-CONTROLLED GADGETS & BIOFEEDBACK" -- interesting stuff.
