Read Also: Smart Home Devices Expose You to Thousands of Hackers: 8 Ways You Can Protect Your Gadgets and Yourself Amazon Kindle Security Update Against Hackers
This means the malicious book can be of the victim's favorite topic if it means it will be more likely downloaded by the intended victim. The security firm warned that these attacks can also be specific should the attacker discern the type of content the user prefers. With the tokens, the attacker can now access the victim's Amazon account and do whatever they want with it as they please: from fraudulent purchases, access to the victim's bank details, anything the hacker can get their hands on and exploit, really.Ĭheck Point Research added that access to the Kindle can also become the key to accessing the victim's network and all the other devices connected to that network. The crook can also access the authentication token that gives permission to a user to access their Amazon account. Once the hacker has access to the Kindle via the opened malicious ebook, the malicious actor can delete any of the preexisting titles in the device, The Sun explained. Komando noted that the flaw does not apply to Fire tablets. The ebook may appear harmless but when it is opened, the exploit can begin. They can completely wipe your device clean of its downloaded titles as well as gain access to your Amazon account.Īccording to the security firm, hackers can gain access to any Kindle device by uploading a malicious ebook into Amazon's Kindle marketplace. Hackers can gain access to your Kindle through corrupted ebooks. Smartphones and computers may be the more obvious devices to attack because of all the data it stores, but any electronic device can be exploited for data one way or another.Ĭheck Point Research, the Israel-based cybersecurity company, first reported the security flaw on Amazon Kindle through a research paper published recently for DEF CON, a security conference held in Las Vegas. Smart Home devices, for example, are exposed to thousands of hacking attacks in one week alone. This means any device connected to some type of network is vulnerable to hacking attacks. As Yaniv Balmas, the head of cyber research at Check Point Research, said: "any electronic device, at the end of the day, is some form of a computer," per The Sun. Hackers aren't just limited to attacking smartphones and computers. Fortunately, you can protect your device and data from malicious actors. Hackers can wipe out your device of all its books, take over your account, and steal your data. Pressing the home button on your tablet should now open the Amazon launcher.Your Amazon Kindle eReader can be hacked.
Run both of these commands, one after the other:Īdb shell pm enable -user 0 Īdb shell pm set-home-activity /.Launcher If you're having issues with third-party launchers, or you want to go back to Amazon's home screen for any reason, it's not too hard to reverse the changes. Your Fire tablet should now use the launcher of your choice! Pat yourself on the back. Now you have to disable Amazon's built-in launcher, if you haven't already:Īdb shell pm disable-user -user 0 Try this instead, and don't delete the quotes:Īdb shell cmd package set-home-activity "packageNameGoesHere/activityNameGoesHere" If a giant help page prints out instead of "Success," you're probably using an older version of Fire OS that doesn't have that command available. Now that you have both the activity name and the package name, go back to your Terminal/Command window and run the below command (substituting "packageNameGoesHere" for the app's package name, and "activityNameGoesHere" for the activity name you found in Activity Launcher):Īdb shell pm set-home-activity packageNameGoesHere/activityNameGoesHere