Scary New Malware Uses Your Smartphone To Map Your House for Robbers

Scary New Malware Uses Your Smartphone To Map Your House for Robbers

If you aren’t careful, much of the tech you hold near and dear can be used against you. An app called PlaceRaider, for instance, can use your phone to build a full 3D map of your house, all without you suspecting a thing.

Developed by Robert Templeman at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indiana and a few buddies from Indiana University, PlaceRader hijacks your phone’s camera and takes a series of secret photographs, recording the time, and the phone’s orientation and location with each shot. Using that information, it can reliably build a 3D model of your home or office, and let cyber-intruders comb it for personal information like passwords on sticky notes, bank statements laying out on the coffee table, or anything else you might have lying around that could wind up the target of a raid on a later date.

That malware app was developed on Android for practical purposes—presumably because the Android is a particularly open and tinker-friendly OS—but there’s no reason it couldn’t show up on other mobile operating systems. From there, it’s a just a matter of tricking the mark into installing an app which quietly asks for permission to control your camera, all the time. Now might be a good time to start thinking about smartphone lens caps.

PlaceRaider: The Military Smartphone Malware Designed to Steal Your Life

The US Naval Surface Warfare Center has created an Android app that secretly records your environment and reconstructs it as a 3D virtual model for a malicious user to browse
The power of modern smartphones is one of the technological wonders of our age. These devices carry a suite of sensors capable of monitoring the environment in detail, powerful data processors and the ability to transmit and receive information at high rates.
So it’s no surprise that smartphones are increasingly targeted by malware designed to exploit this newfound power. Examples include software that listens for spoken credit card numbers or uses the on-board accelerometers to monitor credit card details entered as keystrokes.
Today Robert Templeman at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana, and a few pals at Indiana University reveal an entirely new class of ‘visual malware’ capable of recording and reconstructing a user’s environment in 3D. This then allows the  theft of virtual objects such as financial information, data on computer screens and identity-related information.
Templeman and co call their visual malware PlaceRaider and have created it as an app capable of running in the background of any smartphone using the Android 2.3 operating system.
The message is clear–this kind of malware is a clear and present danger. It’s only a matter of time before this game of cat and mouse becomes more serious.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1209.5982: PlaceRaider: Virtual Theft in Physical Spaces with Smartphones

 

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