Little bluetooth prank

[getsomehax]

Hi
I just registered here and thought i could a little prank that i pulled off today.
I was at my data transmission networks lecture today and the lecturer was talking about bluetooth connections and that once there was a king whose name was Harold Bluetooth. I renamed my phone to "Harold Bluetooth" and searched bluetooth devices around. I found my lecturers laptop called "ASUS" and sent him a contact. Everyone saw the screen since he was using a projector. Suddenly a message on the screen popped up saying "Harold Bluetooth is trying to connect". Almost the entire class started laughing

Few years ago this was called bluejacking and there was a large online community of bluejackers however it has totally died off. Probably because of the bluetooth securities or something.

Anyone else got similar stories to share?

 

[mikedt]

Hi
I just registered here and thought i could a little prank that i pulled off today.
I was at my data transmission networks lecture today and the lecturer was talking about bluetooth connections and that once there was a king whose name was Harold Bluetooth. I renamed my phone to "Harold Bluetooth" and searched bluetooth devices around. I found my lecturers laptop called "ASUS" and sent him a contact. Everyone saw the screen since he was using a projector. Suddenly a message on the screen popped up saying "Harold Bluetooth is trying to connect". Almost the entire class started laughing

Few years ago this was called bluejacking and there was a large online community of bluejackers however it has totally died off. Probably because of the bluetooth securities or something.

Most likely because BT discoverable and visible is normally OFF by default on devices these days, for this very reason. AFAIK BT only needs to be discoverable when one is actually pairing BT devices. Even then discoverable should only on for a few minutes, enough time to pair the devices, which again I think is the default for most modern BT devices.

Anyone else got similar stories to share?

I know there was a UK supermarket sending advert messages to people's phones that had BT discoverable on. This was a few years ago though.

 

[9to5cynic]

Yeah, bluejacking, that's pretty old school now. Though, I remember reading about this tool, I forget the name. It would allow you to use a directional bluetooth device to connect to a car. It would then bruteforce the connection, (as most of those devices are limited in PIN and usually something like all ones...), and then you could talk to the car.

It actually lead to a pretty weird article about how you could in theory shut down the air bags on that car. I don't know enough about car computers to know if that is true or what, but pretty interesting.

 

[TxGoat]

Not so much a bluetooth thing, but back when I worked at Apple, we had a jackass of a supervisor that acted like he was Mr Big. We had all sorts of Wifi networks that we used on a regular basis. One day we had a regional manager visit us so I renamed my phone's Wifi hotspot to MooneySux (name of the supervisor) and broadcast it throughout the day. I'm sure the regional manager had to connect his laptop via our Wifi and I bet he wondered why there was a Wifi hotspot with that particular manager's name.