Bluecasting’s Bluespamming Blasted by Internet Security Industry   8/26/2005 - 980 views, 1 Comment

Most recently, here, Bluecasting showed up to defend its actions, saying that “by making your handset discoverable you are permissioning ANYONE to send you something” - in otherwords, the “she asked for it” defense.

Now others are starting to take notice of Bluecasting’s practices, and labelling them “dangerous”.

The problem, says industry experts, is that it teaches users bad habits. Just like we don’t want people who receive spam to click links in the spam, we don’t want people who receive requests to send files on their bluetooth-enabled devices to start blindly accepting them.

Says Patrick Runald, a senior consultant with security company F-Secure “This is dangerous from a user behavior point of view. We’re trying to tell people not to accept things on their phones if they are beamed at them. All mobile viruses rely on the users accepting them in order to spread.”

Moreover, once the connection is established, the sender, in this case Bluecasting, may send you other things as well, and even have access to files and data already on your device, such as addresses, personal files, and more.

Responds Bluecasting’s Alasdair Scott, in his response here defending their actions, having your bluetooth device discoverable is “like putting your number in the phone book.” Meaning if it’s there, they have a right to abuse it.

To see the full article with Scott’s defense, and many readers’ responses, see here.