Smartphone users beware! Hackers can steal your bank details just by your fingers’ movements

We all make several movements on the screens while using our smartphones, either to type or command the phone for something. However, a research published in the International Journal of Information Security has said that hackers can steal PINs and passwords just from these motions.

This shows how easy spying has become for malicious websites and apps.

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As per cyber experts at Newcastle University in the UK, four-digit PINs can be cracked with 70% accuracy on the first guess, which reaches to 100% by the fifth guess. Phone's numerous internal sensors help guess these motions.

However, most people are unaware of this, knowing nothing about the twenty five different sensors that are available on current smart phones.

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"Most smart phones, tablets, and other wearables are now equipped with a multitude of sensors, from the well-known GPS, camera and microphone to instruments such as the gyroscope, proximity, NFC, and rotation sensors and accelerometer," said Maryam Mehrnezhad, research fellow at Newcastle University. "But because mobile apps and websites don't need to ask permission to access most of them, malicious programmes can covertly 'listen in' on your sensor data and use it to discover a wide range of sensitive information about you such as phone call timing, physical activities and even your touch actions, PINs and passwords."

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"More worrying, on some browsers, we found that if you open a page on your phone or tablet which hosts one of these malicious code and then open, for example, your online banking account without closing the previous tab, then they can spy on every personal detail you enter," she added.

"And worse still, in some cases, unless you close them down completely, they can even spy on you when your phone is locked."

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With a boom in mobile gaming and health and fitness apps, sensors have become a necessity in today’s smartphones, and most of these, apart from camera and GPS, don’t even ask for users’ permissions before capturing the movements.

(Image source Medical Daily)