Monday, June 13, 2005
Blackberries not private
This post is for the techno-savvy and gadget happy, the ones who are definitely hip enough to know not putting in emails what they wouldn’t want to appear in a newspaper headline. Your blackberry isn’t safe either. Note the word “mistakenly” in the follow quote from an article by Javad Heydary for TechNewsWorld:
“Common belief has mistakenly held that messages sent from one BlackBerry to another using PIN numbers, rather than using normal e-mail addresses, will bypass a company's computers, thus making these communications completely private since the messages are being sent directly from one device to another.”
This little bit of insight comes to us courtesy of a court case in Canada. A large bank is suing a new investment management firm founded by bank ex-employees. It alleges that the ex-employees tried to recruit colleagues for the newco while everyone was still working for the first bank. And as evidence, that bank produced PIN protected Blackberry messages between the suspects which had been stored on their servers.
The lesson here is clear: just because the communication is peer-to-peer, don’t be fooled into thinking the transmission path doesn’t include a server somewhere in the middle that is facilitating the whole thing.
“Common belief has mistakenly held that messages sent from one BlackBerry to another using PIN numbers, rather than using normal e-mail addresses, will bypass a company's computers, thus making these communications completely private since the messages are being sent directly from one device to another.”
This little bit of insight comes to us courtesy of a court case in Canada. A large bank is suing a new investment management firm founded by bank ex-employees. It alleges that the ex-employees tried to recruit colleagues for the newco while everyone was still working for the first bank. And as evidence, that bank produced PIN protected Blackberry messages between the suspects which had been stored on their servers.
The lesson here is clear: just because the communication is peer-to-peer, don’t be fooled into thinking the transmission path doesn’t include a server somewhere in the middle that is facilitating the whole thing.
# posted by AmandaWelsh @ 1:02 PM 
