PCFormat Forum Archive

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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