Overview:
If you are using the popular voice assistants product at your home then this news is for you. In this article, I am going to share with you which type of negative effects. Which is done by the laser light to smart speakers like Alexa, Google Home & Siri. Laser light is able to hack the Smart Voice Assistants.
How It will be hacked?
A team of academic researchers Takeshi Sugawara, Benjamin Cyr, Sara Rampazzi, Daniel Genkin, and Kevin Fu published a joint research paper from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo. The researchers of Michigan University have successfully demonstrated, that attackers could remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands using laser lights into smart speakers, such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Facebook Portal, and Apple Siri. The name of code which will be injected is “LightCommands”. This innovation promises to inject malicious commands into several voice-controlled devices & smart speakers including smart speakers, phones, etc.
Researchers proved that apart from Audio these devices microphones also affected light effects. Basically, smart voice assistants are based on the consumer’s voice commands. The light command will use the shining laser light to approach the microphones of these devices & finally it’ll effectively control the smart speakers. It sends the inaudible signals to the Alexa, Siri, Portal, or Google Assistant devices & it proved that it’ll be hacked by these types of laser light.
The researchers analyze. That by changing the laser’s intensity to a specific or particular frequency then directly target it to any smart speaker’s microphone. It diverts the microphone to interpret the laser as if it were sound.
What is the Solution?
After raising this issue the good news is that all respected companies, like Google, Amazone, Facebook & Apple are working to fix this issue. But for now from our side, if we’ll take care of our devices to protect our information we’ve to follow the given below tips.
- Mute Device:
Mute your device when you are not using it. Because it is the best way to get your stop listening. Whenever you want to use it we’ll turn it on from mute mode.
- Do Not Store Personal Results :
Your voice assistant will help you to pay bills & manage other personal details. That could be able to expose if it’ll be hacked by someone else. The other option is to keep it away from your smart speaker or turn it off.
- Manage network properly:
To save or stop data sharing or hacking of your smart speakers you have to connect it with the secure network. For example, if you are using wifi then do not use open wifi connection because your data will also be captured by the open network connection. So, if you are using the wifi connection then use WPA 2 encrypted wifi network connection rather then open hotspot. We can create the guest wifi for other users as well as other IoT devices.
- Set It Away From Open Spaces:
As we know the nature of laser light. It is capable of traveling a huge amount of distance with the signals or data. So, to save it from hacker’s eyes, we’ve to make sure that our device is not in the open area of our homes as well as offices like a window or gallery.
If we take the above steps, so we are able to enjoy the services which are provided by those smart speakers & keep our life more easy with it.
