Your phone may hear more than you think.
Prevent your Android device from spying on you!
Researchers have discovered a technique that allows hackers to listen to your phone calls using the device’s motion sensors. The hack is theoretical at this point, but it’s the latest in a growing number of concerns about phone security.
“When compromised, a smartphone is in many ways the perfect spying device,” Mike Fong, CEO of mobile security firm Privoro, told Lifewire in an email interview. “It virtually never leaves the target’s presence, it serves as a nexus for the individual’s most important information, and it contains a number of sensors (including cameras and microphones) that can be hijacked to obtain secrets that would otherwise remain unrecorded.”
The recent paper describes a new phone attack method, EarSpy, discovered by researchers from Texas A&M University, Temple University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, and the University of Dayton. EarSpy uses your phone’s speaker and accelerometer to measure the slight vibrations generated by the speaker.
