ALERT: Malicious Amazon Alexa Skills Can Easily Bypass Vetting Process

From thehackernews.com

Researchers have uncovered gaps in Amazon’s skill vetting process for the Alexa voice assistant ecosystem that could allow a malicious actor to publish a deceptive skill under any arbitrary developer name and even make backend code changes after approval to trick users into giving up sensitive information.

The findings were presented on Wednesday at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) conference by a group of academics from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the North Carolina State University, who analyzed 90,194 skills available in seven countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and France.

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