New Android malware a burglar's best friend

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Stuart
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New Android malware a burglar's best friend

Post by Stuart »

Newly released malware PlaceRaider sounds like science fiction: It's Android malware designed to build 3-D models of users' apartments for burglars and assassins. But PlaceRaider--developed by a team at Indiana University--is very real. The new malware was built as an academic exercise, and it exposes security flaws that government agencies would love to use. More importantly, it also exposes unintended mobile functionality that large companies like Google could easily monetize.

PlaceRaider, which was summarized in a recent arXiv paper, is a piece of “visual malware” which smartphone cameras, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, to reconstruct victims' rooms and offices. The trojan runs in the background of any phone running Android 2.3 or above, and is hidden in a photography app that gives PlaceRaider the necessary permissions to access the camera and upload images. Once installed, PlaceRaider quietly takes pictures at random that are tagged with the time, location, and orientation of the phone. PlaceRaider also, of course, mutes the phone's shutter sound.

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Re: New Android malware a burglar's best friend

Post by Tribble »

I was wondering if someone was able to do that sort of thing - access the camera - not make 3D models of your room. I guess that millions of photos of my table, ceiling or contents of my handbag are going to be really useless to someone.

What would be more interesting would be whether they can switch your phone's mike on and record conversations and then mail those conversations to third parties or upload them to a server somewhere. Would be a very effective bugging device.
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Re: New Android malware a burglar's best friend

Post by Anakha56 »

I want this so I can make a 3D model of my house, that would be awesome.
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Re: New Android malware a burglar's best friend

Post by Tribble »

lol - imagine the PC you would need to render the images. I have played with 3D modelling programs and if you don't have a fast processor it can take ages
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