---
title: "The Defunct Scooter Company, And The Default Key"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-defunct-scooter-company-and-the-default-key-ce07sj045
source_url: https://hackaday.com/2026/01/23/the-defunct-scooter-company-and-the-default-key/
type: article
source: "Hackaday"
published: 2026-01-23T16:40:19.936Z
updated: 2026-03-15T05:54:46.900Z
tags: ["bluetooth", "hardware", "iot", "reverse-engineering", "security"]
reading_time: 1
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# The Defunct Scooter Company, And The Default Key

**[Hackaday](https://daily.dev/sources/hackaday)** · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A developer reverse engineered a defunct Estonian scooter company's Bluetooth protocol to restore functionality after the cloud service shut down. The investigation revealed a critical security vulnerability: all scooters used a hardcoded default key ("ffffffffffffffff") that was never changed by the manufacturer, allowing anyone to unlock and control any Äike scooter. The IoT module vendor confirmed this was a default value that should have been customized during development.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://hackaday.com/2026/01/23/the-defunct-scooter-company-and-the-default-key/>

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Tags: [#bluetooth](https://daily.dev/tags/bluetooth), [#hardware](https://daily.dev/tags/hardware), [#iot](https://daily.dev/tags/iot), [#reverse-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/reverse-engineering), [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-defunct-scooter-company-and-the-default-key-ce07sj045)