Ready, Aim, HACK!
KD5YPT writes "According to a story on Wired, Adam Laurie and Martin Herfurt demonstrated that they can hack a Bluetooth enabled phone from up to a mile away using a sniper rifle with yagi antenna. Kinda gives a new meaning to '1337 hAx0r2'."
Now all the people that hack Counter-Strike will be out on the streets with Snipers hacking Bluetooth devices, leaving CS hack-free. Thank god.
I'm not impressed. If you really want to impress me, use a Cap'n Crunch whistle over a Bluetooth-enabled phone to switch your neighbor's TV to the Spice channel with the volume up to 50.
Fun.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
If I saw a guy pointing a gun at me from far away (or close), I wouldn't be worried about him taking my contacts out of my phone.
No more paying for those pricey 900 numbers... I'll just hack some poor schmuck's phone and whack o..err... talk for free.
Hey, guys. Big gulps, huh? Cool. All right! Well, see ya later.
After I RTFA, I found that a sniper rifle was not used
The BlueSniper "rifle," created by John Hering and colleagues at Flexilis as a proof-of-concept device, resembles a rifle. It has a vision scope and a yagi antenna with a cable that runs to a Bluetooth-enabled laptop or PDA in a backpack.
What, so instead of "Fucking tool" it now will mean "Fucking tool who's in jail for aiming a sniper rifle at someone"?
True.
Do you think that cops would arrest you first for
a: hacking or
b: carrying around a F'n sniper rifle?
"No, officer, I swear I wasn't shooting anybody, I was just trying to hack their phone!"
...that you have to call the guy at the other end and ask him to stand very very still :)
That's why you should turn bluetooth off when you're not using it.
Is there really any need to have bluetooth turned on all the time? I would think that it just wastes batteries.
To understand recursion,
you must first understand recursion.
Was covered in brief on tomshardware in a post on /. yestarday
All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest
If deployed in the field, special ops soldiers can approach a terrorist safehouse, and activate this device to hack into any cell phone that may be vulnerable. Then they could simply listen in on the safehouse without ever being even 500 feet away, and can discern their movement if necessary.
All this translates into being able not to tip off the bad guys that you are coming, and still able to glean important intel.
This is yet another reason NOT to buy those stupid phones with 14 different features. Every time I buy a cell phone, I buy the cheapest one available, so it doesn't have all of this crap associated with it. I just want a cell phone that *works*. The last thing I want is a phone with so many useless features that it actually has *security* holes! That's insane. So if it comes to the point where the only phone I can get has this stupid Bluetooth stuff, then I have to worry about feds wiretapping me AND kids hacking in? Great. I'm going back to cans and string.
That would result in:
2) Nerd factor points increase in orders of magnitude
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Some researchers found a way to completely destroy bluetooth-enabled cellphones from up to a mile away with a sniper rifle by failing to RTFA.