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Hackers Can Silently Control Your Google Home, Alexa, Siri With Laser Light

Hackers Can Silently Control Your Google Home, Alexa, Siri With Laser Light
Nov 05, 2019
A team of cybersecurity researchers has discovered a clever technique to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice-controlled devices — all just by shining a laser at the targeted device instead of using spoken words. Dubbed ' Light Commands ,' the hack relies on a vulnerability in MEMS microphones embedded in widely-used popular voice-controllable systems that unintentionally respond to light as if it were sound. According to experiments done by a team of researchers from Japanese and Michigan Universities, a remote attacker standing at a distance of several meters away from a device can covertly trigger the attack by simply modulating the amplitude of laser light to produce an acoustic pressure wave. "By modulating an electrical signal in the intensity of a light beam, attackers can trick microphones into producing electrical signals as if they are receiving genuine audio," the researchers said in their paper [ PDF ]. Doesn't this so

Android 'Trusted Voice': My Voice Is My Password

Android 'Trusted Voice': My Voice Is My Password
Apr 14, 2015
Today device unlocking has become far more secure over the years, from PIN number unlock to Pattern unlock and biometric unlocks including fingerprinting and facial recognition. But... ...What If Your Android Device Can Identify Your Voice before authenticating any access? This exactly what Google is trying to provide its Android 5.0 Lollipop users. Users running Android 5.0 Lollipop on their smartphone devices may soon be able to unlock their devices simply by saying " OK Google ." " Smart Lock " is one of the most convenient security features provided in Lollipop that offers a handful of clever ways to unlock an Android device automatically, which yet includes: Trusted Device Trusted Places Trusted Face However, Google is now rolling out a new smart lock, dubbed " Trusted Voice ," that uses your voice as a password to unlock your device. Just as your fingerprint or face recognition is considered distinctive enough for biom

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future
Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
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