Hi friends,People love smart phones for the wide variety of applications available for them but don’t think about people actually trying to hack phones. Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey recently used a specific program to intentionally gain access, or “virus”, called a rootkit to demonstrate just how easily smartphones are hacked.

Rootkits have been around for quite a while and they have been used for twenty years to gain unauthorized access to various kinds of computers.

Hacking the art of exploitation

The point of the exercise was not to develop a new kind of rootkit but rather to create awareness around how vulnerable smart phones are to viruses and hackers.

Your everyday smart phone basically runs the same OS (operating system) as your desktop and laptop and is just as susceptible to viruses as your notebook and desktops are without additional anti-virus guards. In fact they are in even more danger as there are no anti-virus programs to aid the cellular phone market.

People carry phone’s around all the time, making it easier for attackers to eavesdrop (listen in on conversions), track locations or even collect personal information. Also, features such as Bluetooth and text messaging make it easier to send rootkits to phones.

Iftode and his colleagues demonstrated many kinds of rootkit attacks. In one instance, the microphone on a smartphone could be turned on remotely using rootkits, allowing someone to listen in on anything going on around the smartphone.

Another attack uses GPS which is a common smartphone feature. A simple text message allowed researchers to track the location and activity of the owner of the smartphone.

“I can listen to all of your corporate meetings where trade secrets are released. I know where you are all the time,” said study team member Jeffrey Bickford, also at Rutgers. “In the future, when smartphones are ubiquitous and everyone has them, they can be particularly dangerous.”

Finally, the team used another exploit to turn on all applications and features that thrive on processing power in order to run down the battery, leaving the phone at a continuous need for charging and rendering it inoperable.

Malware defenses are needed.

The researchers say their intentions are not to scare people but rather to create awareness and get the ball rolling with regards to an anti-virus guard being developed for smartphones.

The team used an open-source smartphone called the Openmoko FreeRunner running Linux software, but emphasized that with enough time and effort, any smartphone operating system can be attacked with viruses or “malware”.

The Rutgers team plans to use their results to help developers create new ways to detect and prevent rootkit attacks on smartphones as they do not exist at the moment.

“It turns out that solutions that can be used to detect rootkits on a traditional desktop [computer] environment are either not directly applicable or require modifications to make them applicable to smart phones,” said Vinod Ganapathy, who is the assistant professor of computer science at Rutgers.