NameDrop: Is the latest iPhone update feature safe?
Police agencies across the land are raising awareness to the iPhone “NameDrop” feature that arrives already enabled with the latest iPhone update,
If you have an iPhone and have completed the recent Apple iOS 17 update, they have set a new feature called NameDrop defaulted to ON. This feature allows the sharing of your contact info just by bringing your phones close together. Police departments are warning of the risks this poses to those unaware about this feature, especially children who could have their personal information stolen by those looking to do harm.
BuddoBot, a veteran and minority-owned business, specializes in authentic offensive cybersecurity. By emulating real-world attacks continuously, they go beyond traditional automated scanning and compliance. Their team of professional hackers and security experts craft custom solutions, utilizing true-to-life attack vectors to preemptively identify and mitigate potential security breaches.
“Convenience and security don’t always go hand in hand. Typically with one you sacrifice a bit of the other. Proximity-based tools like AirDrop and NameDrop, even with their ‘click-to-accept’ feature present risks such as ‘Drive-By Hacks’ that can outweigh the benefits. We recommend keeping proximity-based features completely off/disabled until the point in time it is actually needed and then immediately re-disable after the exchange. This is especially important for children and teenagers that haven’t developed a zero-trust mentality and may click ‘accept’ just to get that pesky window to go away. Keeping these features on by default essentially gives bad actors more “pockets to pick,” says Luke Secrist, CEO of BuddoBot.
Police suggested parents change the setting on their children’s phones, iPads and other Apple devices. Tech and cyber security expert Alan Crowetz told CBS Philadelphia the feature can be especially dangerous for children.
“If a stranger walks by your child and gets their contact information,” Crowetz, with InfoStream, said, “They have their email and we’ve seen how the bad guys, the pedophiles and whatnot really take advantage of email, phone number for texting — they really take advantage of that. And God forbid they decided to use the home address to visit or stalk even deeper. From a cybersecurity point, this is a major red flag.”
There is some hysteria currently surrounding NameDrop, and some feel it’s unwarranted. But realizing that if the feature is enabled, phones must be within an inch or two of one another for NameDrop to kick in, combined with the “click-to-accept” feature, makes NameDrop relatively safe, according to The Washington Post.
Knowing that, this writer still disabled NameDrop on his iPhone. And although the feature in enabled mode can be considered “relatively safe,” I would still recommend disabling it on my kids’ phones.
For those that have updated to iOS 17 and would like to disable the feature on your or your children’s phones:
Go to Settings > General > Airdrop and select ‘Receiving Off’ and disable ‘Bringing Devices Together.’
For more on NameDrop, see the video accompanying thi article.
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(Source: BuddoBot)
(Cover photo, iPhone update, NameDrop feature, Image credit: Twitter)
Posted by Richard Webster, Ace News Today
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