Sneaky motion-detection feature found on Android malware

A strain of malicious software was activated on Android smartphones only when the infected phone was moved, according to research published by security vendor Trend Micro. The malware came embedded in seemingly legitimate apps Currency Converter and BatterySaverMobi, which were available in the Google Play Store, Trend Micro said Thursday. Once downloaded, the malware sought to avoid detection by monitoring the motion sensor on victims’ devices. The logic seems to be that if a hacked phone was moving, the device probably wasn’t a research tool being used by a security company trying to detect malware, researchers said. “As a user moves, their device usually generates some amount of motion sensor data,” the company explained in a blog post. “The malware developer is assuming that the sandbox for scanning malware is an emulator with no motion sensors, and as such will not create that type of data. … If it senses that […]

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Gesture Sensing With A Temperature Sensor

Good science fiction has sound scientific fact behind it and when Tony Stark first made his debut on the big screen with design tools that worked at the wave of a hand, makers and hackers were not far behind with DIY solutions. Over the years the ideas have become much more polished, as we can see with this Gesture Recognition with PIR sensors project.

The project uses the TPA81 8-pixel thermopile array which detects the change in heat levels from 8 adjacent points. An Arduino reads these temperature points over I2C and then a simple thresholding function is used to …read more

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A Motion Sensing Light For Your Entrance Hallway

Arriving home to a dark house with an armful of anything is usually an exercise in fumbling confusion until someone manages to turn on a light. [Pavel Gesyuk] has circumvented this problem entirely by building and installing a motion detecting entrance light!

[Gesyuk] is using an Arduino clone by the name of  Funduino Mini Pro, a 2-channel, 2-way relay, — he only needed one, but you use what you have on hand — a recycled power supply to convert 220V AC to 5V DC, and an infrared sensor.

The project’s goal — in excess of a lighting solution for an …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Automated Wildlife Recognition

Trail and wildlife cameras are commonly available nowadays, but the Wild Eye project aims to go beyond simply taking digital snapshots of critters. [Brenda Armour] uses a Raspberry Pi to not only take photos of wildlife who wander into the camera’s field of view, but to also automatically identify and categorize the animals seen using a visual recognition API from IBM via the Node-RED infrastructure. The result is a system that captures an image when motion is detected, sends the image to the visual recognition API, and attempts to identify any wildlife based on the returned data.

The visual recognition …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Magic Bit-Of-Wire Motion Detector Library For Arduino

We’re still not sure exactly how [connornishijima]’s motion detector works, though many readers offered plausible explanations in the comments the last time we covered it. It works well enough, though, and he’s gone and doubled down on the Arduino way and bundled it up nicely into a library.

In the previous article we covered [connor] demonstrating the motion detector. Something about the way the ADC circuit for the Arduino is wired up makes it work. The least likely theory so far involves life force, or more specifically, the Force… from Star Wars. The most likely theories are arguing between capacitance …read more

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