The legendary Defcon infosec conference was this past weekend in Vegas, and visitors with iPhones noticed they were getting iOS popups to share their passwords with nearby “Apple TVs.” It’s Defcon, so of course that was a prank by a researcher who calls themselves Jae Bochs on Mastodon. TechCrunch’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai has the story:
Bochs said that this experiment wasn’t designed to collect any data, but rather to send Bluetooth “advertisement packets that don’t require pairing (and as such aren’t stopped by the control center toggle).”
The researcher said that to stop these pop ups someone needs to turn off Bluetooth via the Settings app, not from the Control Center, which users can invoke by swiping down from the top right corner of the iPhone.
Those iOS Control Center toggles that don’t actually turn anything off have just never been a good idea!
