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Radio Waves Can Be Used To Hijack Androids and iPhones Via Siri and Google Now

An anonymous reader writes: Two French researchers have discovered a way to use the Siri and Google Now voice assistant software to relay malicious commands to smartphones without the user's consent or knowledge. This method relies on a special hardware rig that can send radio waves to smartphones with earphones plugged into them. The radio waves get picked up by the earphone cable, get transformed into electrical signals and then to software commands. The research is accompanied by a YouTube video as well. Note that this attack, as the article explains, so far relies on some bulky dedicated equipment, and on the attacker being close to the system he wants to disrupt.

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  1. yes, AM radio. Mic input is more sensitive by raymorris · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, it's the same idea. Microphone inputs are much more sensitive than speakers, so it happens a lot if you use a long mic cable but don't use the correct type, or if a connection is broken in the mic cable.

    Am radio is basically the audio signal added to the radio signal. An antenna is a wire, and a wire is an antenna. So if you have a wire hooked up to a sound input which somehow does process the radio signal (such as by not being fast enough to do so), you can easily end up with just the AM audio coming through the wire/antenna to the audio input.