Security Alert: Replacing Screen May Lead Hackers To Your Phone | TechTree.com

Security Alert: Replacing Screen May Lead Hackers To Your Phone

Researchers have found out that embedding a malicious micro chip into the display screen can record your personal data from your phone.

 

Getting a broken display screen replaced on your smartphone is a costly affair, and we all have experienced the horrors of it. Thus, most of us tend to go for a cheap fix at a local repair shop. Well, beware! It seems that hackers have now found out a new way of stealing your data by installing a malicious chip while replacing touch screens of smartphones.

The deadly truth has been uncovered when ARS Technica published a report mentioning that researchers at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev simulated attacks on Huawei Nexus 6P and LG G Pad 7.0, and were able to take control of the devices by using a malicious chip embedded into a third-party touch screen.

It is also said that these malicious chips embedded into the touch screens can also record photos, keyboard input, internal data, and even direct users to phishing websites.

As, The Verge, reports, the researchers have also wrote in the paper, Our attack assumes that the phone’s touch controller had been replaced with a malicious component, but that the rest of the hardware and software on the phone is authentic and trusted.”

Interestingly, since the hack is hardware-based, even antivirus softwares fail in detecting the malware and, the worst part is, you cannot kick it out by just resetting your phone to factory settings and formatting the drive.

Apparently, though researchers have used Android phones for this instance in the demonstration videos, they have certainly mentioned that there is no reason that any such similar technique would not work on iOS devices. In-fact, according to ART Technica, it is not expensive to perform this as researchers have used. in the video, cheap materials to embed into the phone.

Having said everything, the only thought that rumbles is how we can prevent this from happening. Well, researchers have given an outline in the report that manufacturers should be using a series of low-cost hardware-based countermeasures, while another way to prevent is to have some sort of certification process while replacing internal parts.

Next time, when your smartphone's display is broken, be careful and think twice before you take it to some local repair shop. You now have something more to be worried about than your broken display! What do you feel? Let us know in the comments section below.


TAGS: Smartphone, Mobile Security

 
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