The scariest Google Glass hack just got fixed before anyone evil could actually use it, but the details are a little unsettling.
Using nothing more than Glass’s camera and a malicious QR code, hackers would have been able to steal total control of the device if you so much as looked at the wrong thing.
Thankfully, the exploit was found the security folks at Lookout, and not actual hackers, and their proof of concept shows what it could have done. Basically, the hack would have allowed anyone to hijack and gain full access of any pair of Glass if it so much as scanned a bad QR code just once. The scanned code would have been able to initiate a silent connection with a remote server, and let hackers creep on everything Glass does, and even let them control it from some hidden hacker cave.
There aren’t many people out there with Glass right now, and Google fixed the exploit before news of it went public, but it’s still a peek into the scary future of spyware. When you’re routing practically your whole life through a gadget, there’s both a wealth of information for hackers to steal, and a ton of ways for them to try and hack you. It’s wild to think just looking at the wrong thing could compromise your whole digital life.
Hopefully we’ll have this all figured out by the time everyone’s a cyborg, but between now and then there’s plenty of speculatively dystopian cyberpunk fanfic to be written about Google Glass. Get to it. [Lookout Blog via Slashgear]