Are your smart gadgets running on Android? If yes, that means it is running Linux underneath. Well then, get ready to get bugged – because an attacker never sleeps!
Yes, you got it right. Your smart wearables can be easily hacked and all your data can be stolen. Recent studies have shown that hackers have found a simple yet efficient way to steal all the data on your wearable like your Smart Watch.
All smart wearables communicate with other devices (or servers) to sync data. The medium of data transfer is either Internet (mostly Wi-Fi), Bluetooth or Audio jack. All these mediums can be easily hacked and most of them transfer your personal data in plain-text (Bluetooth does).
Let’s take the case of a smart watch. Since it runs on android, it can be ROOTED…! Once it is rooted, all your personal data in it is gone.
A hacker needs to get physical access to your smart watch and then using commonly used smartphone rooting tools (KingoRoot, RootGenius,etc) it can be rooted. Since most of the data in the smart watch is stored in plain-text, it’s just a game of minutes. But you are lucky, as till date, there is no transaction data (which will fetch money directly to hacker) on your smart watch.
What about health-related data? There is high probability that it is sold to pharma companies and in return, fetches money for the hacker.
Researchers have proved that Bluetooth can also be hacked. We all have used Bluetooth and paired other devices. Once you pair a device, you are not asked for key again. Bluetooth pairing uses Diffie-Hellman key exchange or a 6-digit PIN. 6-digit PIN contains nearly 1 million possible combinations. So with available computational speed, Brute-forcing is quick.
Not even Near Field Communication (NFC) Tag is safe. With tools like Proxmark3 kit in market, cloning your smart tags is quick. Skimmers have been using it for a long time.
Time to think if your privacy has been breached?