How to block bluetooth device that spams me with pairing requests?

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.

Solution 1:

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:

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.

Solution 2:

Inspired by @ccpizza's answer.

Open terminal and type:

1. sudo plutil -convert xml1 /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist
2. Find the MAC address of the offending Bluetooth device. You can find it by searching /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist.

3. Add this section to the plist:

   <key>IgnoredDevices</key>
   <array>
           <string>ff-ff-ff-ff-ff-ff</string>
   </array>
   

Where FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF is the MAC address of the offending Bluetooth device.

4. sudo plutil -convert binary1 /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist
5. Reboot OS X if necessary.

Solution 3:

1. Find the MAC address of the culprit Bluetooth device
2. Disable Bluetooth
3. Type sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.Bluetooth.plist IgnoredDevices -array-add '<ENTER MAC ADDRESS HERE>' in the terminal
4. Enable Bluetooth again