Blackjacking is hijacking and hacking a BlackBerry device, PDA, or smartphone.
These devices are everywhere; you are hard-pressed to go to an airport
and not see business people hovering over these little devices, typing out
emails with their thumbs. While convenient and a darn good way to stay connected,
many people don’t think about the security threats to these devices.
In particular, enterprises are receiving more and more requests from their
business units to implement BlackBerry technology, and it really makes a lot of
sense. Once the toys of executives, these devices have become mainstream and
are invaluable to personnel at all levels within an organization. Instead of a
sales guy checking his email when he gets home, he can quickly be alerted to
incoming messages and reply within seconds from just about anywhere he can
receive a cell-phone signal. These devices also can conveniently contain customer
contact information, sales sheets, and all types of other proprietary
information. All that information in one convenient device that also serves as
a mobile phone —undoubtedly this makes a mobile workforce more productive.
Who wouldn’t want to implement this useful and efficient technology?
Here’s the problem. As convenient as these devices may be, they still are
essentially mobile computers—mobile computers that contain sensitive and
proprietary company information and that can easily fit in one’s pocket. Nontraditional
mobile computers, a la BlackBerrys, never really receive the same
security respect as traditional computer systems.
One of the things that is nice about my job is that I get to talk to some of the
largest corporations in the world and educate them while they educate me on
the best security practices for mobile devices. In doing so, I rarely work with
any corporations that do not have some darn good technology in place. They
must implement the latest firewalls, IDS/IPS equipment, antispam, content
