Do you know how many kinds of sensors your smartphone has inbuilt? And what data they gather about your physical and digital activities?
An average smartphone these days is packed with a wide array of sensors such as GPS, Camera, microphone, accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity, gyroscope, pedometer, and NFC, to name a few.
Now, according to a team of scientists from Newcastle University in the UK, hackers can potentially guess PINs and passwords – that you enter either on a bank website, app, your lock screen – to a surprising degree of accuracy by monitoring your phone's sensors, like the angle and motion of your phone while you are typing.
The danger comes due to the way malicious websites and apps access most of a smartphone's internal sensors without requesting any permission to access them – doesn't matter even if you are accessing a secure website over HTTPS to enter your password.
Your Phone doesn't Restrict Apps from Accessing Sensors' Data
Your smartphone apps usually ask your permissions to grant them access to sensors like GPS, camera, and microphone.
But due to the boom in mobile gaming and health and fitness apps over the last few years, the mobile operating systems do not restrict installed apps from accessing data from the plethora of motion sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, NFC, motion and proximity.
Any malicious app can then use these data for nefarious purposes. The same is also true for malformed websites.click
No comments:
Post a Comment