Last August, a presentation "Blackjacking - Owning the Enterprise via Blackberry" was made at the Las Vegas Defcon concerning a researched ability, not yet detected in the wild, to successfully hack a Blackberry. What made the hack so special was that this gave the attacker a way to bypass enterprise IDS (Intrusion detection systems) since the attack occurred over the encrypted RIM network. A typical enterprise installation of Blackberry creates the Blackberry device as essentially a network node. Therefore, the hack depositing a trojan horse gained access to the entire enterprise.
Blackberry immediately responded with some papers describing how to avoid these types of malware attacks.
There are two main areas of prevention. One is to put the Blackberry on its own network segment and keep it separate from the other enterprise network segments. The other is to require administration approval for installing programs on the Blackberry. The ability in install programs by the user on the Blackberry was used in the Defcon presentation to install a trojan horse by installing a tic-tack-toe game.
If you or your enterprise uses Blackberry's, download the papers and then implement their recommendations. If you don't make these changes then your enterprise is open to malware attacks from the Blackberry. Finally, make sure that your enterprise has layers of identity strong authentication security to mitigate the risk of these kinds of attacks should they get through your perimeter defenses.
Guy
www.authenticationworld.com
guy.huntington@authenticationworld.com
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