YouTube is home to tons of weird, funny, bizarre videos. However videos that could potentially hijack your smartphone? Apparently this is a thing, at least according to Professor Micah Sherr at Georgetown University. He claims that this is largely thanks to the fact that these days we are starting to place more emphasis on voice software.According to Sherr, “It might not work every time but it’s a number’s game. If a million people watch a kitten video with a secret message embedded, 10,000 of them might have their phone nearby. If 5,000 of those load a URL with malware on it, you have 5,000 smartphones under an attacker’s control.”
Basically it sounds like a video could hide voice commands in it and muffle it under regular audio, but at the same time it will be loud enough where a nearby smartphone could pick up on it. If you have ever had Siri or Google Now accidentally activate itself while you’re watching a video because it sounded like, “Hey Siri” or “OK Google”, you know what we are talking about.
That being said, it seems like there haven’t been any cases where phones have been hijacked through this method, but what do you guys think? Is this something we need to be more concerned about? Or do you think it’s a bit of a stretch?