4/13/2005

Bluetooth Sniper

This was an interesting article about a student that goes to the University of Southern California that developed the BlueSniper rifle, a tool that looks like a gun and can attack a wireless device from more than a mile away. The maximum range of Bluetooth is 328 feet. This gun exceeds that by quite a bit. The student, who works for a technology development company says that the sniper hasn't been used to actually "hack in" to people's personal files and data, but simply assessing the vulnerabilities and what's possible. It is expected that installed Bluetooth products will total about 500 million, double of what it was at the beginning of 2004. According to this article, if you have a Bluetooth-enabled device, you need to be careful of what is in your files. It seems like this is only promoting for hackers and people like this to try and develop something like this too. Hopefully the industry's Bluetooth Special Interest Group will be able to provide some kind of security to protect bluetooth.
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1 comment:

Dr. Tufte said...

That's really interesting. Doesn't have much to do with ManEc, but it got my attention.

WRT Lana's comment, it has long been a (partially justified) fear among corporate IT people that the computer programmers are the ones creating the security threats too (as a form of job security). This may not be common, but it is not an urban myth either: leaving back doors in programs is common (and often essential). Further, the first virus was actually written by people with a computer repair business.

11:28 PM

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