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Hackers are hijacking Sonos and Bose speakers to play scary sounds

By Nickey Ross - on 29 Dec 2017, 11:33am

Hackers are hijacking Sonos and Bose speakers to play scary sounds

Image source: Wifimedia.au

It has been discovered that several Sonos and Bose speakers possess vulnerabilities that allow them to be hijacked. When hackers do take over the speakers, they play Alexa commands, creepy noises and Rick Astley tunes.

Fortunately for Sonos and Bose, only a fraction of their speakers including the Sonos PLAY:1, Sonos One and the Bose SoundTouch were affected. The speakers need to be connected to a misconfigured network and a basic internet scan, and it would be ready to be hacked. 

Once the scan detects the speaker, the API would then use it to communicate with apps that would command the speakers to play audio files hosted at a specific URL. Trend Micro reports between 2,500 to 5,000 Sonos devices and 400 to 500 Bose devices were susceptible to hacking.

All in all, the hackers would not really be able to gain a hold of users' personal data, due to the misconfigured networks. Hacking ethics aside, one has to admit that it does make for a funny prank though.

Source: The Verge.

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