Maybe you forked out and bought one yourself, maybe you landed one from that Discovery deal that has everyone up in arms – whatever the case, you love your Apple Watch and it goes everywhere with you on your wrist.

It also goes with when you draw money from the ATM, and it’s here that you might be landing yourself in a rather tricky situation.

That’s because hackers are crafty, and now they can use your Apple Watch (or fitness tracker) to steal your ATM pin code.

TheHackerNews reports:

The risk lies in the motion sensors used by 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”…

…computer scientists from the Stevens Institute of Technology and Binghamton University used a computer algorithm that can guess your password and PIN with about 80% success rate on the first attempt, and over 90% of the time with 3 tries.

Researchers say their “Backward PIN-Sequence Inference” algorithm can be used to capture anything a person type on any keyboard – from automatic teller machine or ATM keypads to mobile keypads – through infected smartwatches, even if the person makes the slight hand movements while entering PINs.

If that’s what can be done with a watch hack imagine the harm that could be caused through a PC? We’re not taking those risks, which is why we use the best in the business to keep us safe.

Well that’s just grand, because if you didn’t have enough to worry about then add this to the mix.

So what do these researchers recommend? It’s pretty simple:

Always enter your passwords or PINs with the hand that is not having a wearable device with the highly sophisticated motion tracker.

Makes sense, but if I did have an Apple Watch wrapped around my wrist I doubt I could be trusted to remember.

Maybe you should give the folks at NEWORDER a ring and make sure you’re protected good and proper.

[source:thehackernews]