Bluetooth social engineering Marek Bialoglowy, 2005-04-25 from Bluetooth Security Review, Part 1 As Bluetooth mobile phones are always used by humans, it is certainly possible to use social engineering techniques to attack them. The common lack of basic security awareness among phone users and general lack of understanding of Bluetooth technology is certainly an advantage for hackers. One of the tests which I performed for the purpose of this article clearly proved that social engineering attacks on Bluetooth are possible. To test this theory, I named my laptop Bluetooth dongle to PIN1234, 1234 or PASS1234 (in several different tests) and simply tried to connect to any discovered Bluetooth devices within the foodcourt of one of of the biggest malls in Jakarta. Benefiting on the 200m range of my equipment, I was able to discover from 3 to 11 Bluetooth devices during lunch time, and had tried to connect to each of them. Surprisingly, an average of 1 in 10 tries had my connection accepted. The phone users simply read "PIN1234" as the name of device which was trying to connect to his/her handphone, and so the user types the 1234 PIN (passkey) to accept the connection. This could potentially allow me to retrieve their phonebook, send SMS messages from the attacked phones, or even read Inbox SMS messages through AT commands. I can add that 4 of the 10 tries were most likely ignored by the user who did not even notice the connection to the phone (the connection remained pending for 30 seconds), thus the success rate of this type of attack seams to be relatively high for the users who actually notice the Bluetooth connection attempt. It is also interesting that majority of users do not realise that by accepting the connection they may not only receive data but also allow data to be retrieved on the majority of Bluetooth enabled mobile phones.