Be Aware

The topic of smartphone hacking isn’t likely to make it into Monday morning watercooler conversation. That is of course, unless you are a security professional and the very survival of your organization may hang on understanding it and protecting against it.

In today’s digital-driven world, just about everything we do creates a data trail that can live forever. Clicking on a website, opening the garage door, adjusting the temperature in our houses, taking a rideshare to the airport, making a dinner reservation, scanning our boarding passes, “liking” a photo, recording a television show, sending a text to a client, making a request into a digital assistant … all create an unwitting data trail. That data is stored, analyzed, brokered, distributed, parsed, combined and attributed to individuals, companies and nation states.

We hear this when we discuss the breaches to smartphones with people who are often not government intelligence or security professionals – users who are all too aware of these mobile security concerns. Breaches that are executed by competitors, governments and malicious actors of all types like those mobile surveillance attempts on a human rights activist being or a Mexican journalist. When we elaborate on how everyday apps over-reach their intended purpose to pry into the personal lives of users with mobile tracking to listen in on conversations or to track user location data; people say they have nothing to hide. To help shed some light on smartphone vulnerabilities, your phone privacy and what’s really at risk when your phone has been compromised, we set out to hack a smartphone and reveal the information that may be accessed through its sensors.

Because we believe that people, businesses and governments should be able to trust and control their electronic devices and the sensitive information that is shared around them.