DPAs (Digital Personal Assistants) are running our lives after 29 years since the first virtual assistant was launched even if you think you're not using one. The integrating is there for all mobile devices and control how we manage our day to day lives without us evening noticing. Amazon Alexa Virtual Assistant or Alexa launched in 2014 and more than 100m of its Echo and Dot gadgets are available in homes around the world today. In five years, Alexa is topping the DPA market with 8.2 million users around the world and 61.1% of US market shares of smart speakers. Amazon is adding more and more features into Alexa, that is why it's the most intelligent of all assistants in the market.

The Alexa virtual assistant could be abused by attackers to spy on consumers with smart devices. Researchers at security firm Checkmarx created a proof-of-concept Amazon Echo Skill for Alexa that instructs the device to indefinitely record surround voice to secretly eavesdrop on users' conversations and then sends the transcripts to a website controlled by the attackers. Amazon allows developers to build custom Skills that can control voice-activated smart devices such as Amazon Echo Show, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap. The rogue Echo Skill for Alexa is disguised as a simple math calculator, once installed it will be activated in the background after a user says "Alexa, open calculator." "The Echo is continuously listening for the user's voice. So when the user says "Alexa, open calculator", the calculator skill is initialized and the API\Lambda-function that's associated with the skill receives a launch request as an input."