Amazon’s Alexa is one such smart devices created to improve our lives but has recently became a double-edged sword for the users as well. For instance, Alexa doesn’t really turn off totally and it is always listening for new commands and background noises at home.

Thus, when the user does not mention Alexa, the unit will be in a standby mode and yet actively seek for user’s voice for any new task. At first, this seem fine for the user but on the hindsight, this mean that the user is being remotely monitored at all time.

A Perfect Eavesdropping tool?

Recently, a team of researchers from Checkmarx has created a voice drive skill for Alexa to record surround voices then later to eavesdrop conversations and finally sent the voice transcripts to third party websites.

The findings from Checkmarx shocked the researchers as everything worked perfectly from the picking up of the background voices to the recordings of conversation and the final step of uploading the contents to the Internet.

According to the team, Alex has become a covert listening device and poised serious breaches to security and privacy issues. Thus, the security firm has reported their findings to Amazon and expected the issues to be rectified by the tech giant soon.

Boon or bane for user having Alexa at home?

The study by Checkmarx has clearly showed that there are some issues with the entire platform and unauthorized people will be able to harness all that information gathered from user’s home. Whether it’s a good or bad thing, that’s hard to say now, as the information gathered can be used to highlight market trend or for ergonomics purposes.

But the true is that people hate to be spied upon and Alexa can do all these things and upload this information to the Internet without the user’s knowledge. Then, if this information fell to the wrong hand, the user may even be vulnerable to blackmail by malicious syndicate. So hopefully this bug will be solved by Amazon as quickly as possible before the worst-case scenario became a reality.

The post Amazon Alexa: A spy or home-helper? appeared first on Hack Ware News.