If your smartphone is behaving erratically, you may be a victim of touchscreen hacking

Cybercriminals are always coming up with new ways to get into your phone. We’ve all heard about it malware, phishing scam, and vulnerabilities, but researchers from China’s Zhejiang University and Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt have now discovered a hardware-based method that hackers can use to take over smartphones.

NordVPN (via TechRadar) explains that bad actors can use electromagnetic signals to simulate gestures such as swapping and tapping to unlock smartphones. The method is called GhostTouch and can allow hackers to unlock a phone and access sensitive data such as passwords and even banking apps. To further amplify the attack, they can also install malware on phones.

All an attacker needs to do to perform this method is to be close to the victim. They could put their equipment in public places to send electromagnetic signals to phones.

The device must be close to the target phone, within 40mm range to be exact, for a connection to be established. After that, it doesn’t matter even if the victim leaves that place.

Nine Affordable smartphones have been found to be vulnerable to this issue, including the Apple iPhone SE (2020), Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G, Nokia 7.2, and Redmi 8.

“phone unlocks itself” is a popular search term on Google and the search returns 209 million results. While that doesn’t mean everyone whose phone unlocks itself has been hacked, it shows that a random unlock doesn’t go unnoticed, which is certainly reassuring.

If you don’t want your phone to become fraudulent, it’s best to have some kind of user authentication protection.

A while ago we saw reports of criminals snatching iPhones after shoulder-surfing victims looking for passwords and emptying their banks. Incidents like this are signs for us to be vigilant in public, as bad guys are unfortunately lurking everywhere.