The Near–Ultrasound Invisible Trojan, or NUIT, was developed by a team of researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs as a technique to secretly convey harmful orders to voice assistants on smartphones and smart speakers.
If you watch videos on YouTube on your smart TV, then that television must have a speaker, right? According to Guinevere Chen, associate professor and co-author of the NUIT article, “the sound of NUIT harmful orders will [be] inaudible, and it may attack your mobile phone as well as connect with your Google Assistant or Alexa devices.” “That may also happen in Zooms during meetings. During the meeting, if someone were to unmute themself, they would be able to implant the attack signal that would allow them to hack your phone, which was placed next to your computer.
The attack works by playing sounds close to but not exactly at ultrasonic frequencies, so they may still be replayed by off-the-shelf hardware, using a speaker, either the one already built into the target device or anything nearby. If the first malicious instruction is to mute the device’s answers, then subsequent actions, such as opening a door or disabling an alarm system, may be initiated without warning if the first command was to silence the device in the first place.
