Hackers’ New, Vibrating Way Of Listening On Your Phone

Two-step verification and biometric security might be useless if hackers decide to use something inherent to smartphones and wearables: motors #securemagic

According to scientists at the Electrical and Computer Engineering school of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,  the vibrations motors emit in electronic devices can be turned into microphones, letting third-parties listen in your conversations. It’s a simple matter of rewiring your vibration motor – a thing that takes a couple of minutes – to hear everything you say.

Sounds terrifying, I know. Especially since you can’t really stop it from happening. Hackers rely on VibraPhone, a system that works with smartphones and wearables, because it provides more than 80% average accuracy, without the need to depend on machine learning or pattern recognition.

The only thing that might present a problem to those pesky eavesdroppers is high frequency sound. You’ll have to speak in a ridiculous tone, though.