Army unhappy with smartphones, trackers

NEW DELHI: After banning smart televisions, the Indian Army has now advised its personnel to beware of smart watches and fitness trackers as these devises can be used to spy on them.

The Army's cyber group based in its headquarters in South Block sent a caution note to all Army commands, units and formations on June 11 advising theft of data by the new-age threat. "As your day-to-day apparel and accessories are turning into networked mobile electronic devices that attach to your body, like a smartwatch or fitness band, the threat to our personal data these devices collect has risen exponentially," says the note of the Army Cyber Group.

Quoting a recent study from Binghamton University, it says: "Your smartwatch or fitness tracker is not as secure as you think and it could be used to steal your personal data, password or even ATM PIN."

The note explained that the risk lies in the motion sensors used these wearable devices. "The sensors also collect information about your hand movements among other data, making it possible for attackers to reproduce the trajectories of your hand and recover secret key entries.

It also states that a computer algorithm can guess passwords and PINs with about 80 per cent success on the first attempt.

Though the Army does not provide any robust solution to prevent such snooping, it has advised its personnel a adopt a low-tech approach, such as entering passwords with the hand that is not wearing a device.

A few months back, the Army had had rung alarm bells over the use of smart televisions, fearing they were highly vulnerable to cyber security threats that can lead to breach of data from sensitive locations. Users must refrain from installing these devises in highly secured environment and ensure that adequate steps to be taken to mitigate the cyber security vulnerabilities, army cyber division had warned.

Last year, the Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) had issued a similar alert on use of smartphone chat and social networking applications with reference to China. These applications, they say, are vulnerable to security breaches and can be used by China for snooping. DGMO advised military personnel and their family members to restrict using such applications as it could lead to "inadvertent loss of sensitive information". The army claims that the location-sharing feature of the mobile phone applications may be fraudulently used to track and target people, especially those working in defence, scientific, industrial research or other government sectors.

Source: Army unhappy with smartphones, trackers