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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. My name's Jonathan Strickland. I'm
Speaker 1: a staff writer here at how Stuff Works. And with
Speaker 1: me is Chris Palette, editor extraordinaire. And we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about Bluetooth security. Uh. Bluetooth is a
Speaker 1: very popular technology. It's getting more and more popular every day,
Speaker 1: it seems, uh. And it's one of several wireless technologies.
Speaker 1: It's if you think of wireless technologies on on a
Speaker 1: on a scale basis, Bluetooth is the really close in
Speaker 1: scale we're talking like, then you have WiFi, which extends
Speaker 1: can extend a little further than that, and then you
Speaker 1: would have y max, which could broadcast much further. So
Speaker 1: Bluetooth is a sort of your personal little small bubble
Speaker 1: of wireless allows you to connect different devices wirelessly to
Speaker 1: other Yeah. For example, UM, to send ringtones to my
Speaker 1: cell phone, I might turn on my Bluetooth on my
Speaker 1: laptop and turn it onto my cell phone and then
Speaker 1: send the files over there. You can exchange photos or
Speaker 1: uh send you know, MP three's for your ringtones. It's
Speaker 1: also what you see when you see those little earpieces
Speaker 1: that people wear in public. They're wireless earpieces. It's the
Speaker 1: piece that connects to your phone, uh and the W
Speaker 1: remote actually uses it to uh communicate with the uh
Speaker 1: the WE game system. So it's it's something you've probably seen,
Speaker 1: although you may not know exactly what it was at
Speaker 1: the time. Right, So if you were wondering what it
Speaker 1: what what those things were that we're making people look
Speaker 1: like cyborgs, uh, that would be the the Bluetooth headsets. Um.
Speaker 1: And also it counts for a lot of people apparently
Speaker 1: muttering to themselves in public when they're actually talking on
Speaker 1: the fountain, right. Yes, it has certainly made me think
Speaker 1: that there were a lot more crazy people on the
Speaker 1: streets than I originally thought, and I live in a
Speaker 1: pretty crazy part of town. But turns out that a
Speaker 1: lot of them were just having conversations with their buddy,
Speaker 1: you know, who is a couple of miles away, legitimately,
Speaker 1: not in an imaginary way. So that's that's sort of
Speaker 1: a relief. Yeah. Unfortunately, with Bluetooth, there are some security issues,
Speaker 1: just like there are with other wireless kinds of technology,
Speaker 1: they're just not their holes in there that that can
Speaker 1: be exploited readily by hackers. Right. The kind of acts
Speaker 1: like a sort of a walkie talkie in a way.
Speaker 1: You're you're you're sending signals by radio waves and uh
Speaker 1: and if you if you don't have your settings just right,
Speaker 1: you're essentially sending them into the general area. Anyone could
Speaker 1: could intercept them or or start slipping little messages to
Speaker 1: you with you being unaware of where they're coming from,
Speaker 1: who they're from. You know. That's what that's what That
Speaker 1: brings us to the first topic of bluetooth security. Bluejacking.
Speaker 1: This is this is a sort of more annoying than
Speaker 1: dangerous most of the time. Yeah, Actually, as I was
Speaker 1: editing this article, I was thinking about doing that myself. Basically,
Speaker 1: what you do is, if you have a cell phone
Speaker 1: that's Bluetooth enabled, you can add a message in your
Speaker 1: address book like you would add a friend, but instead
Speaker 1: of adding your friend's name, like if I were adding
Speaker 1: Jonathan to my address book, instead I would add a
Speaker 1: message called you know, how's it going. And then what
Speaker 1: you do is you turn on your Bluetooth and you
Speaker 1: look it tells you who is around you or the
Speaker 1: devices that are Bluetooth enabled around you. And if you
Speaker 1: could find a phone in there, a lot of them
Speaker 1: look like a string of letters or numbers. May if
Speaker 1: you could find, say, Sony ericson T six ten listed
Speaker 1: in there, you could send how's it going as a
Speaker 1: contact to that to that phone. And when somebody when
Speaker 1: you look around and you see someone's phone ring and
Speaker 1: they get this puzzled look, this person gets a puzzled
Speaker 1: look on your face, you know that you've actually blue
Speaker 1: jacked that person with this secret message, right, And and
Speaker 1: of course you could go a little bit, you could
Speaker 1: have a little more fun with it. Uh. Many of
Speaker 1: the blue jacking sites talk about things like going to
Speaker 1: a mall and just kind of looking around to see
Speaker 1: who has a phone or an earpiece and uh and
Speaker 1: making some educated guesses about what device that person might
Speaker 1: be carrying. Because you don't necessarily know that the devices
Speaker 1: you see listed when when your Bluetooth device to text them,
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily know which ones belonged to which people.
Speaker 1: It takes a little bit of guesswork. But let's say
Speaker 1: you see, uh, someone wearing a Ramones T shirt and
Speaker 1: you might want to write a little message saying I
Speaker 1: hate punk rock and you send it to that person's
Speaker 1: device and they suddenly get a message that has no
Speaker 1: identification on it saying I hate punk rock. They know
Speaker 1: someone's looking at them, they don't know who. Kind of
Speaker 1: freaks them out a little bit. Yeah. That, Um, that's
Speaker 1: the security issue obviously. Uh, this isn't that serious. You're
Speaker 1: just getting secret messages and you don't really know who
Speaker 1: your admirer or detractor is. Um, but if you want
Speaker 1: to uh avoid being the person wearing a Ramon shirt
Speaker 1: and being I identifiable any wait wait, I just want
Speaker 1: to make one thing clear. Do not be the person
Speaker 1: who avoids wearing the remote shirts. Ramons are awesome. Where
Speaker 1: Ramon's shirts they're great. Well, there you go. But if
Speaker 1: you don't want to be identified, what you need to
Speaker 1: do is, if you have a Bluetooth enabled phone, just
Speaker 1: make sure that you don't you know, if you if
Speaker 1: you use the Bluetooth feature, make sure that you don't
Speaker 1: identify yourself in this. You know, don't say this is
Speaker 1: Chris's phone in there, because then they're going to know
Speaker 1: that that's somebody's phone in that. You know, it's available
Speaker 1: and ready to have a message sentulate. Right. Let's let's
Speaker 1: move on to some of the more potentially sinister bluetooth
Speaker 1: security problems, one of which would be intercepting messages, but
Speaker 1: another is tracking people and this is actually going on
Speaker 1: in a couple of different places. Um I was reading
Speaker 1: a news story about bath in England. It was in
Speaker 1: the newspaper The Guardian, where the city was using this
Speaker 1: uh this program to kind of track people's movements, not
Speaker 1: in a way that could identify the individuals within the program,
Speaker 1: but just to kind of see where people were going,
Speaker 1: what places were most popular. But it raises some some
Speaker 1: privacy concerns, and uh I remember in the article on
Speaker 1: our site we specifically talk about shopping malls using this
Speaker 1: to kind of look and see which places in the
Speaker 1: mall are the most popular, right right, Well, they basically
Speaker 1: do the same thing. You have an identifiable number or
Speaker 1: name in your phone and you carry it with you,
Speaker 1: then the bluetooth devices would basically have non identifiable information.
Speaker 1: It's it's actually very much like a cookie on a website,
Speaker 1: because they would say, okay, well, uh j Q for
Speaker 1: ten is going from uh the Apple store down to
Speaker 1: the food court, and they would be able to know
Speaker 1: how much time that that number, you know, spent in
Speaker 1: that particular store and then went down to the food court,
Speaker 1: and they spent another hour down there, and then they
Speaker 1: went down to uh to the department store on the
Speaker 1: other end, it's spent another hour and there they would
Speaker 1: know that much about you, but they wouldn't know your
Speaker 1: name and an address or phone number or any of
Speaker 1: that information, because it's not the same. But it is
Speaker 1: a little weird to think that people could be watching
Speaker 1: you as you go from place to place right there.
Speaker 1: And there's some people who still still assert that it's
Speaker 1: at least possible that eventually you could be identified by
Speaker 1: this information. It would not be easy, and there's not
Speaker 1: really much incentive for anyone to actually go through that
Speaker 1: trouble to do it. But the fact that there may
Speaker 1: be some potential for that has a lot of people worried.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're talking about a privacy thing. I'm sure
Speaker 1: are are. Coworker Josh Clark would be upset if the
Speaker 1: shopping mall had identified that he had gone in and
Speaker 1: out of Victoria's Secret fourteen times. That's probably true and
Speaker 1: completely believable. Yeah, I'm not getting into that, um, normal,
Speaker 1: I get into why so many people in England used
Speaker 1: the phone in their bath. No. Yeah, alright, very cute,
Speaker 1: but seriously, it's not like this identify. This information is
Speaker 1: really personally identifying, and they would have to go to
Speaker 1: a lot of trouble because, as you pointed out earlier, UM,
Speaker 1: Bluetooth is a very short range mode of communication, so
Speaker 1: they would have to have whoever is tracking you would
Speaker 1: have to have sensors, a lot of sensors, like every
Speaker 1: twenty exactly, in order to to effectively track you. So
Speaker 1: we're talking about a system that is not effective as
Speaker 1: far as tracking individuals, and you know, for anything like
Speaker 1: an intelligence agency that's concerned with terrorism, for example, you
Speaker 1: would have to blanket entire city areas with tons and
Speaker 1: tons and tons of sensors and uh and it's just
Speaker 1: not practical. It would it's too expensive, The infrastructure would
Speaker 1: be uh, pretty complex. So on a scale of one
Speaker 1: to tend, Bluetooth security is probably on the you know,
Speaker 1: three to four range. Just for your own personal information. Now,
Speaker 1: it is possible for people to use bluetooth to to
Speaker 1: hijack your phone. It is possible for people to get
Speaker 1: access to your information. Um. Again, it's not an easy
Speaker 1: thing to do, but it's it's possible. So you definitely
Speaker 1: want to be careful about when you're using those Bluetooth
Speaker 1: capabilities with your devices. Um, if you're going to be
Speaker 1: in an area that, uh, that has a lot of
Speaker 1: hackers in it. For example, let's say you're going to
Speaker 1: a hacker convention, might not be the best time to
Speaker 1: enable all your Bluetooth devices. That's true. UM. Honestly, the
Speaker 1: easiest way to avoid any of this is to turn
Speaker 1: your phone or other Bluetooth enabled device to uh. You know,
Speaker 1: it'll say whether you're discoverable or not, that sort of
Speaker 1: Bluetooth jargon. And if you just turn it off, you
Speaker 1: make it non discoverable. Then it's uh, it's impossible. Your
Speaker 1: the power is down, um and no one will be
Speaker 1: able to do that. And it saves battery life, you know,
Speaker 1: because if it's got that radio signal going the whole time,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's draining your battery. So there there's
Speaker 1: another advantage to it right there. Well that's pretty much
Speaker 1: the inside skinny I guess on the whole Bluetooth security issue.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't you say I'd say so. UM, if you'd like
Speaker 1: to read more about it, we've got a couple of
Speaker 1: articles for you. We have what is blue Jacking, which
Speaker 1: is the article about blue jacking and sending secret messages
Speaker 1: to people, and then how Bluetooth Surveillance works if you're
Speaker 1: more interested about the cobrat clandestine world of bluetooth security
Speaker 1: and um those are available right now on how stuff Works.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. For more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com Let
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