Hacker Can Hack you using your Smartphone Remotely

Ritesh Warke

You may heared the word "keylogger",key logger is a software that can be used by a hacker to hack your personal information such as passwords. Hackers install this software on victims computer directly or by remote install. Once keylogger is installed in your PC, hacker will get all the content you typed using your keyboard by a log file generated by keylogger.

A research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology have claimed that, a hacker can use a smartphone placed alongside a PC as a SpyPhone to determine what is being typed on the nearby keabord of the alongside computer.The key factor behind this technique is presense of an accelerometer in each smartphone.Accelerometer is an internal device that have ability to detect when and how the phone is tilted.

Due to this ability of smart phone hacker can sense keyboard vibrations and decipher comlete sentences with about 80 percent accuracy.

However this procedure of tracking keyboard vibratios definately complex,but not impossible,especialy for the well trained hackers and with advance version of smartphones.

Patrick Traynor - assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science claims,

“We first tried our experiments with an iPhone 3GS, and the results were difficult to read. But then we tried an iPhone 4, which has an added gyroscope to clean up the accelerometer noise, and the results were much better. We believe that most smartphones made in the past two years are sophisticated enough to launch this attack"

• How the technique works ?

This technique actually works by detecting the pair of keystrokes, rather than detecting individual letters.Hacker then finds that whether the pair of keys are pressed on either right or left side of keyboard, and are these two keys are closer or far appart from each other. After determining these charecteristics the results obtained are compared against a preloaded dictionary,each word of which has been broken down along similar measurements (i.e.  are the letters left/right, near/far on a standard QWERTY keyboard).

For example:

consider a word "phone", Now when this word is typed it breaks down into four keystroke pairs,"P-H,H-O,O-N,N-E" these pairs then translated into the detection system’s code as : Right-Right-Near, Right-Right-Near, Right-Right-Near and Right-Left-Far, or RRN-RRN-RRN-RLF. This code is then compared to the preloaded dictionary and yields “phone” as the statistically probable typed word. Working with dictionaries comprising about 58,000 words, the system reached word-recovery rates as high as 80 percent.

Traynor said that the possibality of being hunted by this method by a hacker is low becouse of the complexity of tasks to be performed.So smartphone users shouldn't be worried about it but if someone tried hard  then he can definately hack you using your own smartphone.