The Cyber Threat looming on nearly 20 million smart speakers owned by Google and Amazon was smartly thwarted by the technology giants through a smart fix released last week. And Cybersecurity Insiders learned that the web search giant and the technology retailer decided to roll out urgent patches for their respective Home and Echo speakers, to plug the widespread Bluetooth flaws known as BlueBorne.
NOTE- BlueBorne is an exploit which allows a hacker to launch cyber attacks on Bluetooth enabled devices. This includes phone, cars, laptops, security cameras, smart TVs and such. Moreover, the attack can take place on devices running on Android, Windows, Linux, and iOS.
According to Armis Labs, who first notified the world about the flaw, Amazon has so far succeeded in rolling out its Bluetooth updates to more than 14 million Echo devices. While Google has just managed to fix over 3 million Home devices. In coming weeks, the remaining number of devices with the said flaw will be updated with the latest security updates.
Researchers from Armis labs say that BlueBorne has severely impacted Amazon Echo devices than Google Home. And that’s because Echo was vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability in its Linux Kernel and had an info leakage flaw in its SDP Server. Whereas, Google Home smart speakers were only affected by an information leakage flaw in Android’s Bluetooth stack.
And in both cases, a hacker can use the said flaws to own an Echo and prevent Home’s mode of communication from functioning properly.
Furthermore, a survey conducted by Armis labs found that over 82 percent of companies had Echo within their corporate environment. So it has issued a warning to the smart speaker users that the said device can act as a beachhead into their corporate networks.
NOTE- Amazon ECHO is a smart speaker which responds to its user’s voice commands and helps play audio books, set alarms, stream podcasts, provide weather, traffic, and other real-time info. It can also be used as a home automation hub to control lights, security cameras, water supply and other tech systems in a smart building.
NOTE-Google Home works in similar fashion and can be considered as a virtual personal assistant by Google Web Services users.
