Hackers can use phone/device sound to damage human hearing

In this day and age with so many devices being adopted by users across the world, many users are worried about their safety with this ever-evolving technology, and they have every right to do so.

According to researcher lead Matt Wixey, for the PwC UK Cyber Security practice, a doctoral student discovered an exploit in speaker and volume controls through a range of different devices. This exploit allowed for researchers to hack into the devices and access the volume controls to produce sounds at volume levels that would be detrimental to human hearing. The researchers also found that these sounds that could be produced by the device could not only damage the victims hearing, but also the device itself.

Wixey has now taken his findings to a range of different device manufactures and some of these manufactures have updated their firmware so the attacks weren't possible. Unfortunately, Wixey mentions that despite the firmware changes, sound attacks such as these are still open on a plethora of different devices (which he didn't name for obvious reasesons). He also mentions that instead of hackers hacking into devices for data foraging, they could hack into devices with the intent of possible physical harm.