What’s Interesting?

I wanted to take a moment to discuss Bluetooth (BT) scanning tools and how easy it is to find a plethora of BT devices around you at any moment. I’ve been watching some of the objects that have come up lately, which are pretty interesting.

Give it a shot for yourself, and remember to be respectful of the devices and their owners you find. Yes, there are often attack surfaces around to tamper with. Yes, some of the devices make it easy to track their owners (especially wearables). Don’t do those things, but do take a look around and be aware of just what all BT devices are in your home and business. The results might shock you.

What do you need to look around?

Here are two easy tools to help:

1) On your mobile phone, grab an app called nRF Connect (available for iOS and Android in their respective stores and on your laptop). It makes it trivial to see all of the named and unnamed devices near you, at the mall, in a crowd, etc.

2) Another option for your mobile devices, and in some cases, your laptop, is LightBlue. This is a simple to learn and use inventory and debugging tool for BT developers. Very useful for exploring as well.

Give it a shot. Take a look around. Again, be respectful of what you find, but it opens the door to a lot of exciting stuff in our environments that are nearly invisible in many cases to our naked eyes.