Nowadays as our generation is being smarter so the technology is also being smarter with every step. Smarter technology has made our lives so easy that in some cases it’s not even necessary for us to do anything all we just need to do is to make a command and within the very next blink of our eyes, the whole world is in our hands.
Nowadays, mostly in every mobile phone we can easily find out the mobile assistant like if it is an android smartphone then we can mark out the ‘google assistant’ easily if it is an iOS device then we will get to see the voice assistant called as ‘Siri’ and if it’s a high-end Samsung smartphone then there must be the presence of the ‘Bixby smart voice assistant’ other than these Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ is also a worldwide renowned assistant basically a voice assistant.
These voice assistants are basically, an intelligent virtual assistant or IVA that’s also referred to as intelligent personal assistant or IPA, software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions.
Now besides those smart mobile assistants, there are some other smart assistants or home assistants which are widely famous among the techies of this generation. As an example, we can say the name of the ‘google home’ or the vastly famous ‘Amazon Echo smart speaker’ running the Alexa virtual assistant.
Now, this is true that these new, as well as smarter technologies, are making our life easier but we have to admit it that some risks are taking place as we are using these voice commanding technologies.
Because very recently it is proved that these voice commanding technologies can be hacked with lasers that can inject inaudible or invisible commands into devices like ‘google home’, Amazon’s smart assistant: ‘Alexa’ etc. In this way, anybody can easily hack other’s voice assistants and they can easily do things like unlocking doors, locate, visit websites, or unlocking other devices, etc.
And this hacking process is also easy because some voice-controlled systems often don’t require the users to authenticate themselves, so, by the use of lasers someone can easily inject inaudible commands inside of it.
Researchers caught this con of the voice commanding technologies as they discovered the light commanding system in May in the year of 2019.
Actually, via this laser light a hacker can encode the command and then he can shine the light towards the microphone of that smart voice assistant device, and this results in an electrical signal representing the hacker’s command which is then acted upon by the smart voice assistant device like ‘google home’ or Amazon’s ‘Alexa’.
Now using this thing anybody can easily rob a house or make payments on online websites and even they also can hack other devices that were connected with the smart voice assistant device.
Still, the laser light command attack is not accurate yet and it’s likely hackers have many more works and improvements todo in making it practical. Although now this is a real problem to think about, researchers are finding a way to create a real solution to this problem.
