The hackers were able to hijack the phones from up to five metres away, with the use of an amplifer, laptop, antenna and radio.
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According to Wired, researchers at ANSSI, which is a French government agency working on information security, have discovered they can beam radio commands to Siri and Google Now without the smartphone owner noticing anything.
The exploit isn’t without limitations.
Again, the attack only works if the target device has a set of microphone-enabled headphones plugged in. It doesn’t work if users don’t have Google Now enabled from their lockscreens, or if they have Google Now programed to respond only to their voice. Still, the risk isn’t zero. A larger system could do the job from 16 feet, but you’d need a bit more equipment. The phone interprets these electrical signals as someone speaking into a microphone, giving the hackers full access to Siri functions. Think there’s any chance Siri or Google Now could be duped into performing actions on iPhones and Android handsets that you haven’t actually asked for?
The only way to protect your iPhone from getting hacked using this method is to disable access to Siri from the lockscreen.
The researchers argue this could be risky because a hacker could command Siri to visit a malicious website or call a paid phone number to make money. “You could imagine a bar or an airport where there are lots of people”, Strubel says.
In this attack, the headphone cord acts as an antenna, sending commands through the microphone to a digital assistant like Siri.
One way of preventing the hack is by turning off the voice-activated PA – Siri is turned on by default on Apple-supported devices.
The research, which showed how voice commands can be sent to Siri via radio waves, was previously presented during the Hack in Paris conference.
The researchers said that they contacted Google and Apple about their research. Yes, you read that correctly: you could be enjoying your coffee at Starbucks, casually browsing the internet on your iPhone while someone from two tables away gets in your phone and, implicitly, into your private life within a couple of minutes. In the same menu users can also disable access to the Today screen, Notifications View, Reply With Message, and Wallet, if they so choose.
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Wired reported earlier this week that a few researchers in France managed to find a way to hack Siri by silently transmitting commands to an iPhone using radio frequency signals.
