A young man has been arrested and is awaiting trial following using the AirDrop to send a bomb threat to other passengers on a flight from American Airlinesus United States.
According to information from the local newspaper KTSMthe young man was using AirDrop to share a file from a device named “I have a bomb” (“I have a bomb”, in direct translation). This was made possible by renaming the device in Settings, so users didn’t even need to AirDrop to see the bomb threat.
A statement from the Texas Department of Public Safety was shared on Twitter:
The flight was taxiing before takeoff when the threat was made. Because of this, the procedure was interrupted and passengers had to leave the aircraft. The young man then confessed to what he had done, in addition to evidence of the action being found on his iPhone.
Widely used in the Apple ecosystem, AirDrop is a technology for quickly sending and receiving files between devices (iPhones, iPads and Macs). It is a very useful feature in many cases, but it is also used for malicious actions.
Precisely because of the problems involving the feature, Apple implemented with iOS 16.2 a feature that sets a 10-minute limit for AirDrop to receive requests from anyone; following this deadline, the system automatically reverts reception to “Contacts Only”, providing a little more privacy.
