Blackjacking

4What Is Blackjacking?

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, ...