Amazon Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant can be hacked using lasers, experts warn

Fox Business Briefs: Amazon is rolling out new tools to give users control over the stored voice recordings from their Alexa devices, amid a range of different privacy-related concerns. Voice assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant can be hacked by shining a laser on the devices' microphones, according to an international team of researchers. Dubbed "Light Commands," the hack "allows attackers to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice assistants," according to a statement from experts at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the University of Michigan. By targeting the MEMS (Microelectro-Mechanical Systems) microphones with lasers, the researchers say they were able to make the microphones respond to light as if it was sound. "Exploiting this effect, we can inject sound into microphones by simply modulating the amplitude of a laser light," they wrote in the research paper.