October 2016

How your smartphone can get hacked by people walking next to you

60 Minutes USA recently did a great story on how criminals are able to hack into your smartphone by walking near you.

The story covered a few interesting developments. We at Armourcard were already across from the NFC exploitation of the android platform by contactless malicious code injection to trojans being hidden in free apps like games that you or children download.

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You can view the full 60 minutes news story on smartphone hacking here

The malicious code injection or a hidden trojan can reap havoc by telling your cell phone to do something remotely. For example, with a little bit of malicious code injected via the NFC feature on your smartphone and with a walk-by from a criminal pushing out the malicious RFID signal to your phone via the NFC / RFID chip, the hack can tell your phone that next time you’re in a wifi zone to open up a browser in the background to a malicious URL that fools your phone to ‘update or backup’ to the cloud.

All your data from that smartphone is gone in an instant to “the cloud”(a hackers server).  Every ounce of data has a price and all these pieces are carved up by what is now known as a digital ‘chop shop’ and sold off. Everything from emails, SMS, passwords, credit card info, geo-location data. And what is most alarming is that your photos and photos of your family and kids can be sold and resurface on unsavory websites.

Armourcell Phone ProtectionThis new wave of crime which is starting to become more prevalent and is the reason we developed our latest product called Armourcell. It uses the same micro-jamming technology we developed for Armourcard and applies it to the NFC chip in your smartphone, effectively we close the backdoor to your cell phone by jamming the NFC signal until you want to use it. Given that this crime was most recently covered by 60 Minutes USA who ran two separate stories on hacking your smartphone just goes to shows that this crime is becoming mainstream today.

To find out more about how Armourcell can protect your Andriod smartphone go here

 

Armourcell protects your phone


All credit goes to the 60 minutes team in the USA for producing this story, you can see the original article on their website here at the 60 minutes news story on smartphone hacking