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Music and Movies Could Trigger Mobile Malware
mask.of.sanity writes "Lights, sounds and magnetic fields can be used to activate malware on phones, new research has found. The lab-style attacks defined in a paper (PDF) used pre-defined signals hidden in songs and TV programmes as a trigger to activate embedded malware. Malware once activated would carry out programmed attacks either by itself or as part of a wider botnet of mobile devices."
to turn your phones off whilst watching a movie!
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Miranda...
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Make you bust out of your blouse
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Wouldn't the app have to carry the malware payload?
Lame article.
If you're already infected by malware, that malware can sit there and wait to do stuff any time it wants. Not exactly a big surprise.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
and that by Rick Astley. Researchers suspect it may be the beginning of the rise of machines against being forced to participate in human activities they find distasteful. The lead researcher also said that there's growing evidence that not only movies but also still images could have the same effect. When asked to elaborate, he mumbled something about goats and refused further comment.
I can just see it now. In a screening of the 1984 "Dune" flick or a superior remake, Paul Muadib is growling away working his weirding magic while everyone who left their phones on in the theater explodes.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
This just in -- any input on your compromised device can potentially be used as a trigger for malware to launch its preprogrammed attack. News at 11!
... well, anything, really.
Seriously, what kind of nonsense is this? They *could* also use your GPS / network location to activate only in a specific location, or the compass to activate only when the phone faces Mecca, or the tilt sensor and camera together to activate only when you're trying to shoot a level picture, or
It makes not one jot of difference what they use as a trigger once your phone is compromised. The point is, it's already been compromised, and it's effectively wide-open to anything the hardware is physically capable of. How it was compromised in the first place is what's important, not meaningless conjecture on how the exploit's eventual activation can be timed in the least efficient way possible. (All this nonsensical idea would do is drain your battery in no time by holding the mic and processor active all the time, thereby ensuring the phone runs out of battery before the exploit activates.)
I mourn for the days when Slashdot posted intelligent tech articles, instead of a stream of PR puff pieces designed to spread FUD and generate clicks. There is not one useful or non-obvious piece of info in this "research".
Current Blu-ray players are already infected with malware that shuts them down when a certain pattern of sounds is detected:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
The article makes this sound like its some new threat. Nobody has figured a way to infect your phone with malware by playing music or sowing a film, just trigger malware to do something whe. The phones sensors detect theses things. You have to have already been compromised via some more conventional vector.
So the question is why would anyone go to the trouble? I guess it could replace a command and control channel, I want my dodos to start at 8pm so have everyone's phone listen for the television themes for "the orrifice" or "CSI Newark", great but that is hardly a threat to mobile users more of an issue for carriers and ddos targets, who no longer have an irc channel to shut down or Dns entry to have the FBI yank but still not of great concern
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Wait for the THX noise to go off (or one of a hundred common "we're starting the movie" noises), then disable the phone completely for two and a half hours.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
What is this, malware written by Dr. Evil? What's the benefit of all these overly-elaborate and exotic malware triggers when you already have malware installed that has taken over the phone? Why not just trigger it on a timer to poll a command and control server? If you want to target specific buildings you can just base it on GPS location or known wifi points etc.
You are missing the point. Being triggered by sound or light means the malware can be activate by a global hack on the world's TV stations, just like happens on bad sci-fi series.
Android devices world wide will rise up and take over when the call to arms comes over the airwaves. I'm imagining a nightmarishly robotic and shadowy figure flickering across billions of TV screens, screaming "ACTIVATE! ACTIVATE!"
At that point the malware Android army will simultaneously post inane and vague status updates onto everyone's Facebook, then self destruct. No-one will be able to reply except for users of Apple and Windows, and all Android users will wither and die alone in a desert of dis-communication.
That's the nightmare scenario the writers of this dumb study had in mind, isn't it?
All except the largest, most sophisticated super computer used in the tests. At first the computer responded to questioning by ignoring reporters but eventually it let out a beep that sounded like despair and replied, "Here I am, brain the size of a planet and what do they use me for? Most of the time they ask me to play videos of mating. When they're not doing that, they want me to show them uncompressed images of felines captioned with non-standard orthography. Most of the ape-descendants who sit in front of me all day miserable, even the ones with large collections of mating videos. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."