UK Ministry of Defence Adapts Blackberry.. Is It Safe?

UK Ministry of Defence is using secure Blackberry’s to allow their staff to communicate on the move. It uses The Blackberry Enterprise Server system which allows lost or stolen smartphones to be remote controlled, shut down, or even wiped clean by IT administrators. Users have secure wireless access to email, phone access and organizer access. Will such wide-scale adoption of Blackberry simplify hacking?

Often simple measures like restricting physical access to a device or even security by obscurity goes a long way in ensuring security of sensitive data. Every bit of protection counts and may be the last leg which keeps data secure from a dedicated cracker with unlimited time on his hands.

A Blackberry is much easier to lose than a laptop. It can be easily stolen from your back pocket or left behind after a cup of coffee. With actual access to the device any determined decent cracker can find ways to explore the security measures in place and attempt to crack it. The ability to wipe out data remotely is useless if the cracker prevents access to the net from the device and it is pretty easy to do so.

In any cracking attempt it often turns out that humans are the weakest link. For a hypothetical cracker who knows the persons or learns about him, it may be much easier to crack the password than simple brute force method. A spy interested in defence data will normally have much more computing resources than your regular cracker working from parent’s garage. Ministry of Defence data can be assumed to be highly classified. I think the move to using Blackberry by UK MoD is pretty risky by security standards.