In the cyber world, no one has even imagined seeing headphones among the things that are prone to hacking. But some cyber security experts came up, recently, to blow off the false notion. They had revealed the results of their study. The research conducted by the technology consulting firm PWC UK, Matt Wixey, had opened up a new dimension in that domain. The concerned experts developed malware to conduct their experiment.

Wixey shared that they had wondered if it were possible for an attacker to develop malware or attacks to emit noise exceeding maximum permissible level guidelines. By resorting to these ways, hackers could inflict sufferings on the users of the devices.

After that, they tried to put that malware in the devices physically as well as remotely. To their surprise, they managed to achieve that feat. Then they looked for the mechanism through which they could control the devices as hackers. The hacked devices included a laptop, a smart phone, a Bluetooth speaker, a smart speaker, a pair of over-ear headphones, a vehicle-mounted public address system, a vibration speaker and a parametric speaker. After the installation of malware in the devices, they went ahead to keep each of the hacked devices in soundproof containers. For that experiment, they picked-up containers having sound level and temperature measures fitted in them.

The results of the study were astonishing. They found that smart speaker, the headphones and the parametric speaker, out of the hacked devices, were controlled to give high frequency. On the other hand, the Bluetooth speakers, the noise-cancelling headphones and the smart speakers emitted abnormally low frequencies when they were controlled by experts.

Not just that, they also found that the smart speakers melted in five minutes when attacks (malware attacks) were inflicted on the targeted devices. As a result, they got permanently damaged. Also, in the case of the internet-connected smart speaker, the attacks proved that the acoustic devices could be attacked without any physical access to the devices.

In the end, the experts claimed that the hackers could track the movements of the victims by making the hacked devices emit frequencies. The firm ensured that they would not release the malware and had not afflicted human beings for its experiments. On this part, Wixey said that there were a lot of ethical considerations and they wanted to minimize the risk. Also, it shared that the upshot of it was that the minority of the devices they had tested could, in theory, be attached and repurposed as acoustic weapons.

The results are shocking ones. Our ethical experts have to look for possible ways to baulk predicaments.

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