Android-smartphones were able to secretly take pictures – Russian Newspaper

operating system Android hazardous vulnerability is found, using which, attackers can control the camera of the mobile device, hidden taking pictures. This writes Ubergizmo.com.

On detecting danger Sidor said Shimon, a former employee of the corporation Google, which developed Android. According to him, he was able to create an application that can create snapshots and remain unnoticed – because the viewfinder window, which should show a picture, you can make a 1×1 pixel.

on high-resolution display a point almost impossible to see, according to an expert (he experimented with a smartphone Nexus 5 having p 1920×1080 pixels resolution and density of 445 dots per inch). Thus, attackers who decide to exploit this vulnerability may silently for the owner to create a snapshot and then send them to remote servers on the Internet.

According Shimon Sidor, the developers of Google can fix when they issue, if you set higher minimum resolution, which must be the viewfinder of the camera. He also warned Android users that they should be careful not to install mobile applications downloaded from unknown or suspicious sources.

We note that a similar vulnerability was previously found in the operating system Mac OS X. According to researchers, with the help of special software, you can change the camera work microcontroller responsible for turning on and off the LED, which shows that the camera is working. If this LED is disabled, the camera MacBook or iMac will include unnoticed.