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Youngsters sing the ‘blues’ with help of bluetooth

Using the new bluetooth technology, these youths exchange SMS material that is obscene, defamatory, harassing, abusive or sexually explicit.

The worst part of this is that some of these youths breach the privacy of others especially single female shoppers. Despite the tough penalties imposed on those who commit such indecent acts, they keep stalking and observing others and then picture them. The next move is they start exchanging these images using their bluetooth.

"If you have a bluetooth you can get all types of obscene images and short sexually explicit movies. At one of the major shopping malls the youths gather everyday especially in the evenings and start transmitting via their bluetooth abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libellous and invasive material to whoever they want. Anyone who has a bluetoothed phone automatically receives those messages," said a source who is a frequent visitor of the mall.

The latest ‘bluejacking’ is a new form of tones in which the hacker can send peculiar curse words to your phone. Available in the market now are curse words from Arab countries. The most common are from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Gulf countries. They send these cursing tones to mobile users depending on their features. So an Egyptian will get an Egyptian cursing tone and so forth.

A mobile software engineer said that in order to avoid receiving short "obscene" messages or other unwanted material, mobile phone users should always disable their bluetooth when they are in an area which is not "safe".

"Technology is becoming a double-edge sword, while it helps us in downloading software and communicating in an advanced and fast manner, it is becoming increasingly unsafe. With snarf attacks or ‘bluesnarfing’ a hacker can manipulate via bluetooth the settings of your phone without your permission. Using chaos attacks, the hacker can make calls, read and send SMS, edit the phonebook via bluetooth again without your knowledge," the engineer who works for a local mobile repair company told Khaleej Times.

Security flaw

WITH the recent "bluejacking" vulnerability, the bluetooth overseers have created a new security system called Combination Key. This helps prevent people from sending short "obscene" messages to mobile users.

While considering "bluejacking" via bluetooth connections a major security threat, experts are warning about "bluesnarfing".

It has been reported that there is a security flaw that would enable someone to connect to your bluetooth-enabled device, download all your contact info and leave no trace. This attack apparently will even work on a number of devices when they are in invisible mode, at which point they should not be reachable at all. Experts termed this as digital pick-pocketing, where the victim will have no idea they've been taken.

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