Android and Smartphones

ANDROID AND MEEGO SMARTPHONES HACKED USING NFC TECHNOLOGY

“What hackers do is figure out technology and experiment with it in ways many people never imagined.

A skilled hacker has performed an amazing and new technique using which we can easily hack smartphone via short range radio technology which is known as Near Field Communication (NFC).

Here is brief introduction what exactly is NFC:

NFC, short for Near Field Communication, is a short range wireless technology that makes use of interacting electromagnetic radio fields instead of the typical direct radio transmissions used by technologies such as bluetooth.It can make life easier and more convenient for consumers around the world by making it simpler to make transactions, exchange digital content, and connect electronic devices with a touch. Major Benefits of this techonlogy are following:

• Versatile: NFC is ideally suited to the broadest range of industries, environments, and uses.
• Intuitive: NFC interactions require no more than a simple touch
• Open and standards-based: The underlying layers of NFC technology follow universally implemented ISO, ECMA, and ETSI standards
• Technology-enabling: NFC facilitates fast and simple setup of wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc.)
• Interoperable: NFC works with existing contactless card technologies

Since this technology is emerging as the must-have technology for any major smartphone, a demonstration at the Black Hat USA 2012 at Las Vegas security conference showed Samsung and Nokia smartphones were hacked through an NFC vulnerability.
Smartphone hacker Charlie Miller, a principal research consultant at security company Accuvant was able to find security backdoors via NFC on Android and Meego smartphones.He demonstrated how NFC can be used to hack into a smartphone and access user information by demonstrating possible hack scenarios using a Google Nexus S device running Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and a Nokia N9 running MeeGo 1.2. To attack the phones Miller wrote the software to control a reader tag that works in conjunction with NFC, which works when devices are brought close together or are placed near a reader chip.He discovered that the default setting in Android Beam forces a handset to visit any weblink or open any file sent to it, and via this route he forced handsets to visit websites that ran code written to exploit known vulnerabilities in Android.But to attack Android phones they must be running particular version of OS (Operating System),be unlocked and have their screen active.

Nokia claimed that they were aware of and said it was “actively Miller’s research investigating” his claims of sccess against its N9 phone whereas Google does not made any comment.

Using Near Field Communication or NFC ,Smartphone payment systems such as Google Wallet allow Android users to use their phones to make payments with their credit cards, making it more comfortable and convenient.This short-range technology will soon be available on all major smartphones. NFC is designed to let users beam content to nearby devices and use their smartphones as mobile wallets, but it could also be a very appealing target for hackers as proved by Charlie Miller.

So Be Careful Smartphone Users.