By design, the iBeacon advertisement frame is plainly visible. This leaves the door open for interested parties to capture, copy and reproduce the iBeacon advertisement frames at different physical locations. This can be done simply by issuing the right sequence of commands to compatible Bluetooth 4.0 USB dongles. As of Feb 2014, successful spoofing of Apple store iBeacons have been reported.[30] This is not a security flaw in the iBeacon per se, but application developers must keep this in mind when designing their applications with iBeacons.
PayPal has taken a more robust approach, where the Beacon is purely the start of a complex security negotiation (Challenge–response authentication). This is not likely to be hacked, nor is it likely that it would be disrupted by copies of beacons.[31]
Listening for iBeacon can be achieved using the following commands with a modern Linux distribution: