The scary new way hackers can find out your passwords
New research from the University of Cambridge in England as well as Sweden’s Linköping University has explained that malware is now capable of accurately guessing your passwords by listening to the sound of your fingers tapping the screen.
The hackers use the malware to listen via the microphone of your smartphone and use technology that can accurately guess where you’re touching the screen to get every password you use on the smartphone device.
“We showed that the attack can successfully recover PIN codes, individual letters and whole words,” researchers wrote in the paper, according to 9News.
“We have shown a new acoustic side-channel attack on smartphones and tablets.”
Research showed that during testing, the machine learning software correctly guessed a four-digit passcode 73 per cent of the time after ten tries.
The software was also able to identify 30 per cent of passwords that ranged from seven to 13 characters in length after 20 tries.
The malware is reliant on machine learning to predict which key a user has tapped by tracking which sound the microphone heard first. This is a detail that is picked up in a matter of seconds.