Is your cellphone spying on you?
If it isn’t now, it may well be soon, thanks to a new piece of malware developed by the US Navy and called PlaceRaider, which allows them to remotely produce 3D models of whatever room an infected phone is currently in, using the camera and other censors to map out intimate parts of your life.
The developed app is Android specific, and was shown to be effective at stealing personal financial information, listening in on phone conversations, even stealing keystrokes from a nearby keyboard though the use of the phone’s accelerometer.
Deploying the app wouldn’t necessarily be all that difficult, as it could be embedded in another app for, say, a popular phone game and the end user would never realize it had been installed, let alone that it was currently running.
The malware was developed by the Naval Surface Warfare Center with a grant from the National Science Foundation, and is supposed to be a proof of concept of the bad things a criminal could theoretically do with a smartphone virus. At the same time it seems a proof of concept for the bad things the US Navy can already do with its own brand new virus.
Of course there is an antidote to that:
1. Carry two phones……creates confusio
2. A sliver of tinfoil wrapped around the base of the phone
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Get a TracFone or other disposable PAYG phone. Pay for it (and all the minutes) in cash, so there is nothing that links you to it. If the phone has a camera, put masking tape over the lens. Never download an app. If in spite of all the above precautions you suspect the phone has been infected, throw it away (after deleting all contact data and any other personal info). "Disposable" means just that.
To thwart keyloggers and keystroke stealers, install KeyScrambler on every computer you have. This utility encrypts keystrokes at the kernel level, so all a keylogger will record is gibberish.
I am glad I have a "feature" phone now, and not a smart phone.
Welcome to the new world of liberal fascism, from eu to us and beyond. People power is the only way to overcome this growth of militarism regimes "occupying" people's daily life by spaying on them.
"Liberal fascism" – do you even know what a liberal is? Let alone a fascist…
Jason, it's written "sensors", not "censors"
For people interested in the details, they can go directly to the Arxiv to get the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.5982v1.pdf
Nicely done although more a proof-of-concept than anything else (it's not a "virus" yet). It also hasn't been "developed by the Navy", one of the authors is affiliated with the Naval Surface Warfare Center (this is not unusual in security research – Security Enhanced Linux comes from the NSA).
This mainly shows that your smartphone has to be as secure as a Real Computer. Considering that most of the latter are still less-than-optimally secured and lots of practical and theoretical work still has to be done, economic opportunities exist.
Nice of them to let us know ahead of time. Don't mess with byrdbahls !
Great, next your mother, father, wife, sister, son, neighbor will spy on you. Wait, this is just like living in the USSR.
It isn't just the navy. From what I hear, all branches of the military, as well as the CIA have this capability. It really makes you think twice about buying and using a smart phone, doesn't it?