Thursday, October 24, 2019

Turning Amazon and Google Smart Speakers into Smart Spies

Researchers at Germany’s SRLabs found two hacking scenarios — eavesdropping and phishing — for both Amazon Alexa and Google Home/Nest devices. They created eight voice apps (Skills for Alexa and Actions for Google Home) to demonstrate the hacks that turns these smart speakers into smart spies. The malicious voice apps created by SRLabs easily passed through Amazon and Google’s individual screening processes...

For eavesdropping, the researchers used the same horoscope app for Amazon’s smart speaker. The app tricks the user into believing that it has been stopped while it silently listens in the background. more