An application can make your phone spy on you
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LONDON: US military experts have demonstrated a new smartphone app that can turn your mobile's camera into a spying tool forcyber criminals, secretly beaming images of your house, chequebook and other private information back to them.
The software can even build up a 3D model of your house, from which the hackers can inspect your rooms, potentially gleaning information about valuables in your home, calendar entries as well as spying on you.
The app 'PlaiceRaider' was created by US military experts at Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana, to show how cybercriminals could operate in the future, the Daily Mail reported. The creators even demonstrated how they could read the numbers of a cheque book when they tested the Android software on 20 volunteers. As long as the app could be installed on the users phone, it can instantly begin beaming back images from the phone when it senses the right conditions, and software on the other end can then re-construct maps of the visited room.
The team gave their infected phone to 20 individuals, who did not know about the malicious app, and asked them to continue operating in their normal office environment. The team said they could glean vital information from all 20 users, and that the 3D reconstruction made it much easier to steal information than by just using the images alone.
Researcher Robert Templeman said their app can run in the background of any smartphone using the Android 2.3 operating system. Through use of phone's camera and other sensors, PlaceRaider constructs 3-D models of indoor environments. "Remote burglars can thus download the physical space, study the environment carefully, and steal virtual objects from the environment," researchers said.
The software can even build up a 3D model of your house, from which the hackers can inspect your rooms, potentially gleaning information about valuables in your home, calendar entries as well as spying on you.
The app 'PlaiceRaider' was created by US military experts at Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana, to show how cybercriminals could operate in the future, the Daily Mail reported. The creators even demonstrated how they could read the numbers of a cheque book when they tested the Android software on 20 volunteers. As long as the app could be installed on the users phone, it can instantly begin beaming back images from the phone when it senses the right conditions, and software on the other end can then re-construct maps of the visited room.
The team gave their infected phone to 20 individuals, who did not know about the malicious app, and asked them to continue operating in their normal office environment. The team said they could glean vital information from all 20 users, and that the 3D reconstruction made it much easier to steal information than by just using the images alone.
Researcher Robert Templeman said their app can run in the background of any smartphone using the Android 2.3 operating system. Through use of phone's camera and other sensors, PlaceRaider constructs 3-D models of indoor environments. "Remote burglars can thus download the physical space, study the environment carefully, and steal virtual objects from the environment," researchers said.
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