Bluey Hooey
p2pnet.net News Opinion:- "Traditionally, security consultants have made a passable living by frightening ignorant managers with security holes. Then they charge money to fix them."
(They also give no-so-ignorant reporters a way to generate instant headlines, but we won’t go into that right now : )
In the meanwhile, the quote is eWeek’s Guy Kewney in a piece on the Bluetooth scare.
Bluetooth allows short-range WiFi hookups between a whole range of systems – including mobile phones.
But while Adam Laurie, technical director and co-founder A.L. Digital, says, some bluetooth-enabled devices have serious flaws, Bluetooth expert Nick Hunn says A.L. Digital’s research gives little cause for concern.
Who’s right? Kewney isn’t in any doubt.
"It’s a load of hooey," he writes.
After detailing the many and various tech requirments you’d need to perpetrate a bluey, "Finally, what do you get? "A list of phone numbers?
Yet the head of security at Westminster "has deemed the threat sufficiently real to instruct Parliament to disable its phones. Can it really be the case that members of Parliament have phone numbers so secret that under no circumstances should any of them ever let these numbers slip?
"Of course not. The purpose of these ‘news scares’ is simple. It convinces a large group of people that the guy who discovered the ’security loophole’ is a genuine expert in the field (true) and it may frighten some of them into hiring this expert to do security work for them.
"If you think you really, really need those phone numbers, the way to do it is far simpler.
"Follow the Parliament members home whenever they take taxis. Statistically, you’ll get three phones in a month just by being the next passenger in the taxi, because that’s how many of them will leave the phone on the seat when they get out."
