Hackers Could Play Deafening Noises On Your Speaker By Hijacking It

It is alarming enough to learn that companies can track users' browsing when they visit certain sites by playing sound beacon from their speakers. However, those on your laptop, phone, and other devices that are connected to the internet could be hijacked by hackers to do something even more dangerous. They will use your speakers to play psychologically-damaging or deafening sound frequencies.

Matt Wixey (a PWC UK's cybersecurity expert) has helped in the demonstration of this threat. He showed how the hackers could infect commonplace speakers with malware to play dangerously low or high-frequency sounds from them.

These inaudible rackets could still damage our hearing system. The hackers could also use the speakers to track people secretly by detecting and emitting specific frequencies. That is a creepy way to use people's devices against them.

Matt Wixey has written a malware which could exploit various type of speakers. He found out that with just simple code, he could able to get to smart speakers, parametric speakers, and headphones to emit the frequencies exceeding the recommended guidelines.

He said in an interview that he has always been fascinating about malware that can go from the physical world to the digital world.

He also found out that he can overheat hardware of smart speakers by emitting high pitch sound from them. Indeed, due to safety reasons, he is not planning to release his code.

He said that there are lots of considerations to make on the ethical scale, plus he wants to lower the risk. The hackers could hijack your speakers to use it as some kind of acoustic weapons.