Ping flood kills Bluetooth

[Colin Dunstan]

It was only the beginning of a new series of Bluetooth hacks when cryptographers reported a new pairing hack to seize control over Bluetooth devices. Spanish hackers have now discovered that with a simple ping flood using the Linux tool l2ping one can inhibit Bluetooth on many devices:

The attack works by flooding the device with pings, taking up all available requests in the stack. The target device will then stop trying to make connections and may need to be rebooted in order to work properly.