Siri and Google Now Hack: Hackers Control Your Virtual Assistants

Siri and Google Now Hack – a report comes from french cyber security researchers who discovered a way to control Siri and Google Now from a distance.

Hackers can overtake charge on your favorite voice assistant, only if the headphones are plugged in, allowing them to issue any command and device will obey immediately. Pair of employees of the French government agency ANSSI (Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information) discovered that one can use headphones as an antenna and by  its wire to convert surreptitious electromagnetic waves into electrical signals that appear to the phone’s operating system to be audio coming from the user’s microphone.

This  simple and yet amazing hack will allow cyber criminals  to covertly execute commands to make calls, send SMS, initiate phishing attacks and, even download malware by pointing browsers to malicious websites from a distance of 5 meters.

In the interview with Wired, the director of ANSSI, Vincent Strubel pointed out

“The sky is the limit here. Everything you can do through the voice interface you can do remotely and discreetly through electromagnetic waves”

José Lopes Esteves and Chaouki Kasmi notified Apple and Google about their findings by providing recommendations to make better shielding on headphone cords or software updates.

Siri and Google Now Hack Recommendations:

There are some recommendations that might help you to fix this “vulnerability”.

  • Set Siri and Google Now to respond only to your voice commands.
  • Be attentive to browser activities and strange text messages
  • Switch to Cortana

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