Guardian: Hackers can hijack Wi-Fi Hello Barbie to spy on your children

New Barbie can be hacked, and used to spy on you. And your children.  Article by Samuel Gibbs for The Guardian Mattel’s latest Wi-Fi enabled Barbie doll can easily be hacked to turn it into a surveillance device for spying on children and listening into conversations without the owner’s knowledge.

New Barbie can be hacked, and used to spy on you. And your children. 

Article by Samuel Gibbs for The Guardian

Mattel’s latest Wi-Fi enabled Barbie doll can easily be hacked to turn it into a surveillance device for spying on children and listening into conversations without the owner’s knowledge.

The Hello Barbie doll is billed as the world’s first “interactive doll” capable of listening to a child and responding via voice, in a similar way to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Microsoft’s Cortana.

It’s just a matter of time until we are able to have her say anything we want

Matt Jakubowski

It connects to the internet via Wi-Fi and has a microphone to record children and send that information off to third-parties for processing before responding with natural language responses.

But US security researcher Matt Jakubowski discovered that when connected to Wi-Fi the doll was vulnerable to hacking, allowing him easy access to the doll’s system information, account information, stored audio files and direct access to the microphone.

- Read more at The Guardian