It is increasingly getting easy for hackers to infiltrate smartphones through malicious apps via app stores, but now a new study finds that your data can be compromised after replacing your cracked display with a third-party screen with malicious chips.
There seems to be no end to the ways hackers can get inside your smartphone.
Researchers from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have discovered that a replacement screen can potentially give attackers control over your smartphone or tablet.
This is done, they say, by embedding a malicious chip under a third-party screen, which can be used to log keyboard input and patterns, install malicious apps, take pictures and email them to the attacker without the user’s knowledge.
The research team was able to hack into a Huawei Nexus 6P and LG G Pad 7.0 by embedding a malicious chip.
They found that in addition to recording keyboard inputs, installing apps and other remote commands, the attack could also exploit vulnerabilities in the smartphone’s operating system kernel.
An attack of this kind is generally called “chip-in-the-middle” in which a malicious integrated circuit is embedded within two points and monitors the communications they exchange.