Walden Systems Geeks Corner News Amazing Ultrasound Hack Can Secretly Control Siri, Alexa and Google Now Rutherford NJ New Jersey NYC New York City North Bergen County

Amazing Ultrasound Hack Can Secretly Control Siri, Alexa and Google Now

Rita gives you full control of what sites your employees visit. Rita can block sites that eat up your precious bandwidth such as media streaming sites. Rita enables you full control of what sites your employees can and cannot visit. Rita gives you the ability to block undesirable sites by wildcard or by name. Rita gives you the ability to determine which computers will be blocked and which will be allowed. With Rita, you can block access to sensitive servers within your LAN.

Your digital assistant may taking orders behind your back. Voice activated programs can be controlled using inaudible ultrasound commands. This gives a new method of attack for hackers targeting devices like phones, tablets, and even cars. Using ultrasound as discreet form of digital communication is pretty common. Google's Chromecast and Amazon's Dash Buttons use inaudible sounds to pair to your phone. Advertisers also takes advantage of it too, broadcasting ultrasonic codes in TV commercials that work like cookies in a web browser to track a user's activity across devices.

Scientists from China's Zheijiang University have demonstrated that it is possible. To carry out their attacks, researchers first created a program to translate normal voice commands into frequencies too high for humans to hear using harmonics. Then, they tested whether those commands would be obeyed by 16 voice control systems, including Siri, Google Now, Samsung S Voice, Cortana, Alexa, and other voice activated interfaces. Researchers are calling this DolphinAttack because dolphins use high-pitch noises as a form of communication.

DolphinAttack was successful in all the devices, and the researchers were able to issue a number of commands, including activating Siri to initiate a FaceTime call on iPhone and activating Google Now to switch the phone to the airplane mode. They were even able manipulate the navigation system in an Audi. DolphinAttack can instruct a device to visit a website which would download a virus or initiate outgoing phone calls to spy on a victim.

There are some things we can do to protect against DolphinAttack. Developing voice recognition software that can discriminate between ultrasonic waves and genuine human voices. Changing the placement of the microphone, to dampen or suppress ultrasound waves could also stop a surfing attack.