'Dalek' commands can hijack smartphones - BBC News

Researchers have demonstrated how garbled speech commands hidden in radio or video broadcasts could be used to control a smartphone. The clips, which sound like the Daleks from Doctor Who, can be difficult for humans to understand but still trigger a phone's voice control functionality. The commands could make a smartphone share its location data, make calls and access compromised websites. One security expert said users could switch off automatic voice recognition. The researchers - from the University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University - explored whether audio commands "unintelligible to human listeners" were still interpreted by smartphones as voice commands.