American university researchers have developed a novel attack called "Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan" (NUIT) that can launch silent attacks against devices powered by voice assistants, like smartphones, smart speakers, and other IoTs.
The team demonstrated NUIT attacks against modern voice assistants found inside millions of devices, including Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa, showing the ability to send malicious commands to those devices.
The main principle that makes NUIT effective and dangerous is that
microphones in smart devices can respond to near-ultrasound waves that the human ear cannot, thus performing the attack with minimal risk of exposure while still using conventional speaker technology.
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