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Hackers Can Now Guess Your Password By Listening To The Sound Of Your Screen Tapping

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There is a new scary hack that researchers have created. It was discovered that hackers can guess a password by simply listening to the sound of a user’s fingers tapping their phone screen.

 

The researchers were from the University of Cambridge in England and Sweden’s Linkoping University. The researchers reported that hackers can design malware to take advantage of the microphones in handheld devices. They can use it to compromise the users’ passwords and PINs.

 

guess iPhone password

 

They explained that the technique relied on machine learning. It is able to accurately guess more than half of the four-digit PINs used on Android tablets.

 

The researched in the published paper wrote,

“We showed that the attack can successfully recover PIN codes, individual letters and whole words. We have shown a new acoustic side-channel attack on smartphones and tablets.”

 

According to them, the new technique relies on sound waves and microphones. Some people may not know that when they tap on the screens of their tablets and smartphones, it generates sound waves. The hackers can now track which microphone heard the sound first. This could be measured by a software that can make accurate guesses about where the sound originated from on the screen.

 

The system the researchers created was able to accurately guess the four-digit passcode (or password) 73% of the time after 10 tries. Another test was carried out. The system was able to identify 30% of passwords from seven to 13 characters after 20 tries.

 

The hackers will, however, have to first install malware on the phones in order to be able to explore this vulnerability. The malware will also need to access the phone’s microphone to work. However, modern Operation Systems require the user’s permission to access the device’s microphone. This feature makes it a hard scam to pull off.

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