Siri and Alexa can be exploited with ultra-sonic commands

Alexa, tell me a joke. Alexa, set a timer. Alexa, install malicious software. Wait, what? Voice assistants are handy because they’re always listening, but hackers have found a way to turn that against us, according to a new study reported via New Scientist. Voice assistants including Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung S have been hacked by a team of researchers at Zhejiang University in China using ultra-sonic voices.

If you’ve ever been watching a YouTube video that says something like “OK Google,” or “Xbox, turn on,” you’ve seen the first step of the equation in action. These voice assistants are pretty smart, but they can’t tell the difference between live and recorded voices. The research team took those voice recordings and converted them into high-pitched versions outside the range of human hearing and found they were still able to send commands to these electronic devices.

Using these recordings, they were able to do things like open malicious websites, initiate voice and video calls to listen to the device’s surroundings, and even send text messages.

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/09/11/siri-alexa-voice-assistant-ultrasonic-voice-hack/