These cheap Skullcandy earbuds have a worrying Bluetooth flaw that could let anyone connect to your device

Date:
Mon, 14 Sep 2026 23:10:00 +0000

Description:
Apple can push a firmware fix to earbuds already in your pocket. Skullcandy cannot reach yours at all for now.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Researchers warn Skullcandy
Dime 3 earbuds on older firmware accept Bluetooth pairing from unknown
devices with no user interaction required When leveraged, it can be used to interrupt the owner's connections, hijack playback, and even capture live microphone audio The vulnerability has been patched in a newer firmware
update available only on newer units, does not seem to be addressable for existing earbuds Carnegie Mellon University's CERT Coordination Center has warned Skullcandy's Dime 3 wireless earbuds will accept a Bluetooth pairing request from a stranger's device without the owner doing anything.

The resulting bond is permanent, and the only sign the owner gets is a spoken "new device paired" notification delivered after it has already happened,
with zero user interaction to confirm the request. The advisory covering the Dime 3 was written by CERT/CC's Bob Kemerer and credits independent
researcher Jacob Nowak, who had posted his findings to the Full Disclosure mailing list in early August after testing it on hardware he owned. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: A fix deployed that covers virtually no existing users What makes this worse is that, ironically, while Skullcandy was swift in addressing the issue affecting earbuds running firmware version 1.0.0.28 by rolling out a patched version 1.0.0.30, it seems to address the issue only in newly made units.

CERT notes that there seem to be no "consumer-accessible" methods to upgrade existing units to the newest firmware because it reportedly has no support
via the companion app, as a Tom's Guide review indicates . You may like Apple has fixed a security flaw in Beats Studio Buds which let hackers spy on conversations Apple users told to watch out for 'unpatchable' iPhone security issues Best earbuds: top buys, all TechRadar-tested and recommended

A product without an update path that is user-accessible essentially means that its software flaws, or in this case, security issues, are here to stay for users who have had the bad luck of buying an earlier unit.

The underlying vulnerability, CVE-2025-20701, is not new and is not of Skullcandy's making. It is one of three vulnerabilities that Dennis Heinze
and Frieder Steinmetz of the German firm ERNW disclosed in June 2025 at the TROOPERS conference in Heidelberg, affecting Bluetooth systems-on-chip from Taiwan's Airoha. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners
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The Dime 3's Bluetooth identifier names Airoha as its chipset vendor, and while Airoha shipped a fixed SDK to its customers in June 2025 and published its bulletin that August, owners of the earbuds are in a unique situation, to say the least.

The vulnerability's severity is disputed: MediaTek (which owns Airoha) assigned it a relatively low 6.7 rating, while CISA's vulnerability
enrichment program later assigned it an 8.8 with a 'high' categorization .

A potential attacker is limited to what the earbuds can access, since the vulnerability is essentially limited to the earbuds, but one could still
wreak havoc with that alone. It should allow for more than just disrupting a person's routine by 'hijacking' one's earbuds by essentially using their microphones on them to record conversations or, in an extreme theoretical
case (requiring chaining with other exploits), impersonate the headset and pull contacts, call history, and even pass hands-free commands to a paired smartphone. The latter, however, would require a high technical skill set, being within a few meters of a victim, and a Bluetooth connection turned on
on the paired smartphone.

For now, a vulnerability exists that Skullcandy should have been able to patch, exactly as Apple recently did for its Beats Studio Buds, but a lack of support for any third party apps on the budget earbuds is somewhat annoyingly resulting in an unpatchable vulnerability for existing users. Follow
TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/these-cheap-skullcandy-earbuds-have-a-w orrying-bluetooth-flaw-that-could-let-anyone-connect-to-your-device


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