Cybersecurity researchers have found a brand new kind of assault that impacts Android gadgets, and so they say it lets hackers get their palms in your personal information in a matter of seconds.
This contains your personal chats, textual content messages, emails, and even two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, as Ars Technica reported.
The assault, dubbed “Pixnapping” by the crew of researchers who found it, can be utilized to extract info from any information displayed on the display. First, the sufferer has to obtain a malicious app. As soon as the app is put in, a Pixnapping assault can happen with out the sufferer offering any additional gadget permissions.
“Something that’s seen when the goal app is opened might be stolen by the malicious app utilizing Pixnapping,” reads a message on the Pixnapping web site, a useful resource created by researchers to share info on the assault. “Chat messages, 2FA codes, e-mail messages, and so forth. are all susceptible since they’re seen.”
In accordance with the Pixnapping web site, the vulnerability is detailed in a brand new analysis paper, a part of a collaboration between seven researchers on the College of California, Berkeley, College of Washington, College of California, San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon College. A preprint of the paper, titled “Pixnapping: Bringing Pixel Stealing out of the Stone Age,” is obtainable on-line and can be revealed this week on the thirty second ACM Convention on Pc and Communications Safety in Taiwan.
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Data that may not be displayed on the Android gadget’s display, similar to a secret key that’s obscured utilizing asterisks for instance, can’t be stolen by the hackers in a Pixnapping assault. That is due to the way in which the assault is carried out.
As soon as a sufferer installs the malicious app, it weaponizes the Android API to focus on different apps with entry to delicate information. The app then accesses the pixels displayed on the display utilizing an unintended information leak, also referred to as a {hardware} facet channel. The malicious app pushes these particular person pixels by means of the rendering pipeline, the place the Pixnapping assault then performs graphical operations. This continues till optical character recognition, or OCR, can happen, that means the app can extract textual content from visuals.
In impact, any info that is displayed in your gadget’s display can then be stolen.
“Conceptually, it’s as if the malicious app was taking a screenshot of display contents it mustn’t have entry to,” the Pixnapping website reads.
Researchers examined the Pixnapping assault on Google Pixel 6 by means of 9 smartphones, in addition to the Samsung Galaxy S25, working quite a few totally different variations of the Android cell working system, from Android 13 to 16.
Whereas that is definitely regarding information, researchers say that they’re unaware of any real-world examples of the exploit getting used within the wild.
The crew of cybersecurity researchers knowledgeable Google of the Android vulnerability in February. Google launched its first patch for Pixnapping final month. Nevertheless, the researchers found a workaround inside days, and knowledgeable Google as soon as once more. Google says it’s going to launch an extra Pixnapping patch in its December Android safety bulletin.
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