Amazon Echo pushed the boundaries of a smart speaker to another level when it released back in November 2014. It features a super intelligent personal assistant known as Alexa who responds to your voice and provides services such as playing music, making calls, receiving or sending messages and getting the latest information about weather, news, sports scores, etc. in an instant fashion. This hands-free and voice-activated speaker created quite a buzz, thanks to its innovative set of features although there were quite a few people who also considered this device impractical.
In recent news from DefCon, Chinese hackers went on to talk about how it is possible to hack the Amazon Echo and turn it into a spy bug. This insight was shared at a presentation known as “Breaking Smart Speakers: We are Listening to You.” They apparently cracked the hack by taking an Amazon Echo speaker, removing some of its parts and swapping them for some others. This new and modified version of the Amazon Echo was then used to hack into the regular Echos by connecting them both. This surprisingly enabled the hackers to use their own customized Echo as a listening bug without giving any kind of indication to the regular Echo of the transmission.
Wired, which is a popular American magazine, went on to explain how the hack worked. It shared, “If they can then get that doctored Echo onto the same Wi-Fi network as a target device, the hackers can take advantage of a software component of Amazon’s speakers, known as Whole Home Audio Daemon, that the devices use to communicate with other Echoes in the same network. That daemon contained a vulnerability that the hackers found they could exploit via their hacked Echo to gain full control over the target speaker, including the ability to make the Echo play any sound they chose, or more worryingly, silently record and transmit audio to a faraway spy.”
This hack by Tencent hackers might just be an eavesdropper’s dream come true. However, this news will definitely make more than one user of Amazon Echo wary of using their device.