Risks of Laptops with Bluetooth

by Karel Thönissen

from: ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)

Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 11:35:08 -0700
From: Andrew Nicholson <andrewn @ lesto. com>
Subject: Car breakins using bluetooth

I recently lost our rental car in one of the huge parking lots of Disney
World. The color and license plate entry on the rental car tag were
incorrect and we couldn't remember the color and we had the row wrong.

Eventually security drove us around while I pushed the "panic" button on the
remote key fob at any likely looking vehicle. Security knew roughly where
the cars were parked based on the time that you caught the shuttles. Once
we found the car that was it - no further checks.

During the search I asked about car theft from the parking lots given that
they are huge and there is little sign of security patrols etc. The claim
was that they don't have many car thefts, but they do have 4 to 5 break-ins
every day where the contents of the cars are stolen.

Here's the interesting part: every break-in in the past month had involved a
laptop with internal bluetooth. Apparently if you just suspend the laptop
the bluetooth device will still acknowledge certain requests allowing the
thief to target only cars containing these laptops