Amazon’s Alexa Had A Flaw Which Allowed Others To Eavesdrop

There are some concerns that users have with smart speakers and that is they typically come with an always-listening feature. This is usually done so that the speaker can react when the trigger phrase is spoken, but there are some who are worried that as a result of this feature, companies are listening in all the time and invading their privacy.

All companies reassure users that they are not, but unfortunately in Amazon’s case, that reality was almost proven true. According to researchers from security firm Checkmarx (via CNET), it seems that they have discovered a flaw in Alexa that allowed Echo devices to be listening all the time and also allow others to eavesdrop.

The good news is that Checkmarx reached out to Amazon before disclosing the flaw publicly, and that Amazon has since fixed the issue. It is unclear as to whether or not hackers might have exploited the flaw before it was fixed, but so far we haven’t heard anything. In a statement made by Amazon, “Customer trust is important to us and we take security and privacy seriously. We have put mitigations in place for detecting this type of skill behavior and reject or suppress those skills when we do.”

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