By Jordan Crook
Hackers at DefCon have exposed new security concerns around smart speakers. Tencent’s Wu HuiYu and Qian Wenxiang spoke at the security conference with a presentation called Breaking Smart Speakers: We are Listening to You, explaining how they hacked into an Amazon Echo speaker and turned it into a spy bug.
The hack involved a modified Amazon Echo, which had had parts swapped out, including some that had been soldered on. The modified Echo was then used to hack into other, non-modified Echos by connecting both the hackers’ Echo and a regular Echo to the same LAN.
This allowed the hackers to turn their own, modified Echo into a listening bug, relaying audio from the other Echo speakers without those speakers indicating that they were transmitting.
This method was very difficult to execute, but represents an early step in exploiting Amazon’s increasingly popular smart speaker.
The researchers notified Amazon of the exploit before the presentation, and Amazon has already pushed a patch, according to Wired.
Still, the presentation demonstrates how one Echo, with malicious firmware, could potentially alter a group of speakers when connected to the same network, posing concerns with the idea of Echos in hotels.
Wired explained how …read more
Source:: TechCrunch Gadgets
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