The attack was named NUIT (Near-Ultrasound Inaudible Trojan). It exploits vulnerabilities in voice assistants and smart device microphones to implement covert remote access.

How does it work

The following are vulnerable to NUIT to varying degrees:

• Apple’s Siri.
• Assistant from Google.
• Cortana from Microsoft.
• Amazon Alexa.

Well, From phones and laptops to speakers and smart locks, millions of devices can be remotely controlled With the help of special signals limited by ultrasonic, devices are able to make unwanted phone calls, transfer money, turn off alarm systems, open doors, etc. to force.

These types of attacks work by converting voice commands into signals that are indistinguishable to the human ear but are detected by voice assistants. For example, they can be embedded in applications or videos on YouTube. When a vulnerable device “hears” them, it has to comply.

In the case of Siri, the researchers were able to control the iPhone’s volume so that the answer would not speak. Again, compromised Google, Cortana and Alexa did not allow a voice response to the request so that the victim could hear and understand that something strange was going on.

What should I do

During their experiments, the researchers tested 17 devices:

• WITH iPhone X, XR And 8 achieved complete success.
• Sensitive Macbook Pro 2021 And Macbook Air 2017 year, also Samsung Galaxy S8, S9 And A10e.
• Echo Point The first generation from Amazon also fell victim to inaudible signals, but failed to produce an inaudible response.
• Devices Dell Inspiron 15 can be successfully attacked by the methods described, but without an inaudible response from them.
• Also managed to hack apple watch 3, Google Pixel 3, Galaxy Tab S4, LG ThinkQ V35, Google Home 1.
• Interesting, old man iPhone 6 Plus he was invincible. Probably the point is that this version of the smartphone uses a less powerful amplifier compared to the newer iPhone models.

Some devices are often vulnerable to NUIT attacks because the distance between the device’s speaker and microphone is too great. To avoid being a victim of such an attack, researchers advise owners to use headphones instead of speakers (the sound from the headphones is too quiet and far away to be transmitted to nearby microphones and enable the voice assistant). You should also consider enabling voice authentication to protect against unauthorized use.

In turn, manufacturers can develop tools to detect attacks similar to NUIT, which recognize signals at a near-ultrasound frequency and maliciously reject such commands.