Cyber attack depletes cell phone batteries

Bad guys armed with computers might remotely and secretly drain the batteries of cell phones, a new study shows. By commandeering communications channels that cell phones use to capture images and video from the Internet, attackers might repeatedly awaken an idle phone from a low-power slumber into a state of readiness that saps its electric power.

In multiple tests on a Nokia 6620 phone, computer scientists Hao Chen, Denys Ma, and Radmilo Racic of the University of California, Davis used a fake server to repeatedly send information to the phone, depleting the device’s battery in an average of 7 hours.