The research team, led by Mohammad Al Faruque, an electrical engineer, computer scientist and director of UCI's Advanced Integrated Cyber-Physical Systems Lab, discovered – almost by accident – that it is possible for an ordinary smartphone to record the very precise sounds made by a 3D printer during operation. While this may seem innocuous and even pointless, unless you’re trying to create a very avant-garde musical composition, those sounds carry very specific information about the printer’s movements. By analyzing the recording, a would-be hacker can actually reverse engineer the object being printed and then recreate it somewhere else.