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Zero-day: Bluetooth gap turns millions of headphones into listening stations (www.heise.de)

submitted 11 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Bluetooth chipset installed in popular models from major manufacturers is vulnerable. Hackers could use it to initiate calls and eavesdrop on devices.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

It sounds like they have some kind of wake function that it’s always listening for? I don’t think that’s a common feature in headphones just because of the battery drain, but they’re always chucking useless features on electronics so I’m sure some are floating around out there. I doubt it’s something you wouldn’t know about unless they were secondhand, though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

It's BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy.

Basically devices with BLE can listen for a wake-up command and turn on, similar to the "magic packet" of wake on Ethernet.

Super convenient for "find my device" applications, also nice to be able to connect and activate the device without having to press a power button like a peasant.

It also means that most devices with BLE end up flat within a month. I had a speaker with BLE and had to deliberately download a much older version of the Android partner app to turn it off, as they dropped the option to do so in later versions for "convenience". With BLE on it would be flat in about 6 weeks regardless of whether I'd used it or not , which really ruined ad-hoc usage for me.