How to block bluetooth device that spams me with pairing requests

bluetooth

A bluetooth device that is not mine nor under my control asks my computer to pair, about every minute or so.

Interestingly, it's fairly effective as a DOS attack actually.

Disabling my BT is not an option, since I need it for my BT devices.

I want to tell OSX to ignore this particular BT device, but I can't figure out how.

Best Answer

The GUI way

Press and hold together the Option + Shift (⌥ + ⇧) and the click the Bluetooth icon in the topbar.

A Debug submenu will appear as shown below: macos reset bluetooth

You get the options to Remove all devices and Factory reset all connected Apple devices — pick whichever you need.

The terminal way

Open terminal and type:

  1. sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist Enter
  2. rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist Enter
  3. Reboot OSX.

The commands above will remove the MAC addresses of the 'remembered' bluetooth devices from the systems settings. If you want to have a look at the actual contents of those files copy the original file to a user-writable folder and then do:

plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.Bluetooth.plist,

and then open it with a text editor (it is an XML file).

To convert it back to binary use

plutil -convert binary1 com.apple.Bluetooth.plist.

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