Bluetooth technology offers convenience – from hands-free phone calls to wireless file-sharing to playing music on a vehicle’s speakers. But leaving your Bluetooth on all the time can be dangerous, and hackers are exploiting the technology to access private information, spread malicious software, and more.
BlueBorne, an “attack vector” that can infect iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux devices, is spread through the air, according to Palo Alto-based cybersecurity firm Armis. I like to turn off Bluetooth because it also uses power and heats up the Raspberry. I use Bluetooth on very few of my Raspberries, actually…
How to disable onboard WiFi on boot.
Type the following command into the command prompt or just add the quoted section into your /boot/config.txt file by hand with your favorite text editor.
echo “dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi” | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt
At boot time, this line effectively disables the systemd service that initializes the BlueTooth modem:
sudo systemctl disable hciuart
Reboot Raspberry Pi device.
sudo reboot
You can directly edit the config.txt file located on the boot partition before inserting the SD card into the Raspberry Pi 3 device. If you have a change of heart and you want to ENABLE the Bluetooth in the future, just comment out of delete this same line. Don’t forget to reenable the system service with the command:
sudo systemctl enable hciuart
