Have you ever heard a muffled voice coming from you tube videos? Or probably you may not heart it also. However in case your Smartphone has voice enabled functions like Cortana or Siri it may pick up the voice command from the video played in You tube and function in a peculiar way. Micah Sherr a professor at Georgetown University said this kind of hijacking can be possible now as voice recognition has been an integral part of the voice based services like Google Now and Apple’s Siri.
It is hard to hack or highjack a phone in this way but it is always a trial and error and a numbers game. If twelve thousand people watch a video with a secret message embedded in it and out of these 12 thousand let us assume 6 thousand has their voice activated phone in their reach then the hacker has 6 thousand phones under has control with the secret message running their phones automatically. If the hacker is well aware of the nit gritty of the voice recognition software and it internal architecture of working they can create voice commands which human cannot even decipher.
Hence to safeguard the Smartphone against these threats the developers of the voice recognition software as installed in the phone can apply filters which will enable them to differentiate between human voice and machine sounds. This will help them not get activated and work based on those muffled commands. Though it seems a bit far stretched as no phone has been hijacked like this so far but it may be a possibility.
