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An Estonian security researcher reverse-engineered his Äike e-scooter after the company went bankrupt and cloud services became unreliable. He discovered that all scooters shipped with the same default private key for authentication instead of unique keys per device. This cryptographic oversight means anyone with the key can unlock any Äike scooter via Bluetooth. The manufacturer never replaced the placeholder key before production, and with the company now defunct, there's no one to fix the vulnerability. The case highlights common IoT failures: poor key management, reliance on cloud services, and the importance of reverse engineering for device ownership when companies disappear.

Bankrupt scooter startup's single key controlled everything

<p>This ain’t the first time, this happened. Happened to other companies and other fleets, too. For example, this was a case for a fleet of rental bicycles. They all had the same default authentication key to access internals.</p>
