New way Phone is Hacked via Sound Waves

Hacking is getting more popular every day and there are different new methods to hack a mobile phone without downloading any software on your smartphone.

These spy software are most times expensive and the free-to-download ones don’t usually do the job.

Recently, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of South Carolina jointly discovered some vulnerabilities in cell phones, most especially smartphones: tablets, iPad, Android, iPhones, and some other digital products in which motion sensor chips are used.

The team, which is led by Kevin Fu, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan discovered that one can influence the functions of smartphones, automobiles, and some medical equipment through tiny accelerometers in the devices.

In other words, this is another new way for hackers seeking how to hack into someone’s cell phone without touching the phone or the owner knowing.

You don’t control the phone from your phone yet it’s done remotely whenever the user listens to music. The phone is hacked through the sound waves.

 

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to tell if a particular phone has been hacked using music sound waves and this seems to be the best phone hack for android.

No app, no number before one easily breaks into another one’s phone, reads their messages, access gallery, spy on phones to get call logs, and others.

Kevin fu said they were able to achieve this with some hardware physics, making it possible to control the sensors and microprocessors.

With the new hack, he attributed the success precisely to the adjustment of the acoustic tones in the phone to trick the 15 different models of accelerometers into recording a sound that never happened.

The team presented the document at the IEEE European Symposium on Security and privacy in Paris and also to the Vulnerable hardware manufacturers to understand the risks that phones have and how to prevent a real attack from hackers.

This approach is used as a backdoor to the phone device to control other aspects of the phone system or other digital devices.

This method is not published to be used as a method to break into people’s phone devices and privacy and a few devices were only selected for this study.

While this is not to create fear in the hearts of smartphone users but a wake-up call to identify this vulnerability and improve the motion sensor chips used in all these digital devices.

The scientists further stated that this hacking method would also be improved as hackers are looking for more alternatives to achieve a deeper effect through this method and mobile phone hacking as a whole.

It’s important to know that this experiment was first performed on a Galaxy S5 phone and in a graph of the readings of the accelerometer, a Fitbit fitness reader was tricked by playing a malicious audio file with a loudspeaker of the smartphone to gain control over the phone’s accelerometer and manipulate the program which the smartphone relies on.

This is just like when a mobile app is used to control a radio-controlled kid’s toy car.

Kevin fu reiterated that, with the advancement in robotic technology and remote controlling devices, these loopholes would be more common in several other devices as more industries are embracing robots and the flaw is another hacking point.

Accelerometers are very important materials needed in developing robots, they constitute the microelectromechanical systems and are used for navigating, measuring acceleration, to determine the orientation of minicomputers.