Your Amazon Echo or Google Home could be fooled by a laser speaking words

As handy as smart speakers can be, the fact they’re always listening can make them a little creepy — remember how smart speaker makers were caught using humans to listen to voice recordings? Now, researchers have demonstrated a potential new security risk: it’s possible to issue commands to smart speakers with lasers instead of spoken words, as Wired reports.

The researchers found that by changing a laser’s intensity to a specific frequency and pointing the laser directly at a smart speaker’s microphone, they could make the microphone interpret the laser as if it were sound, letting them issue a command to the voice assistant powering the device. And it seems like practically every voice assistant may be vulnerable to this vector of...

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