Hackers Turned an Amazon Echo Into a Spy Bug

Since smart speakers like the Amazon Echo first began to appear in homes across the world, the security community has come to see them as a prime target. But that threat has remained largely hypothetical: No Echo malware has appeared in the wild, and even proof-of-concept attacks on the devices have remained impractical at best. Now, one group of Chinese hackers has spent months developing a new technique for hijacking Amazon's voice assistant gadget. But it may be the closest thing yet to a practical demonstration of how the devices might be silently hijacked for surveillance. At the DefCon security conference Sunday, researchers Wu Huiyu and Qian Wenxiang plan to present a technique that chains together a series of bugs in Amazon's second-generation Echo to take over the devices, and stream audio from its microphone to a remote attacker, while offering no clue to the user that the device has been compromised.