Security Concerns Prompt French BlackBerry Ban
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French government members and their advisors have been told not to use BlackBerry smartphones, for national security reasons. The ban on BlackBerry devices is just one of the IT challenges facing new National Assembly members as they take their seats following Sunday&#39;s elections.
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By Stephen Castle  One of Google's most popular services came under threat yesterday when a court banned the search engine from reproducing articles from Belgian newspapers and opened the door to similar challenges elsewhere in Europe.
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(InfoWorld) - Uncertainty about how to secure mobile phones in the face of increasing threats is slowing enterprise adoption of mobile applications, experts exhibiting at theÂ 3GSM World CongressÂ in Barcelona this week said. Over two-thirds of mobile operators in Europe that took part in a survey said that they detected more than 100 incidents involvingÂ mobile virusesÂ orÂ mobile spywareÂ in 2006, according to a study by conducted by Informa for security software developer McAfee. The number of European operators reporting more than 1,000 such incidents more than doubled in 2006 compared to the previous year, the report said. IT administrators, uncertain how to protect their users from such attacks, are unwilling to enable mobile access to applications for workers. "Enterprise security professionals haven't really worked this out yet," said Lorcan Burke, CEO of AdaptiveMobile. Companies such as banks, with strict security requirements, simply block access to any service, including Internet access, that could open doors to security issues, he said. At the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco, some of the most crowded events were those tackling mobile security issues, said Simeon Coney, vice president of marketing for AdaptiveMobile. That was an indication that IT administrators are trying to find out how serious mobile security problems are and how to address them, he said. Mobile services can be secured in the application, the network or in hardware or software on the device. Among operators responding to the McAfee study, most found that virus protection was most important at application and device levels, although more of them had deployed network-level security systems than the other options. Over 200 respondents from the operator community took part in the study. AdaptiveMobile makes network-level security products for operators, including a system for filtering viruses in e-mail, SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) traffic. Beyond viruses, AdaptiveMobile can also control content, so it can stop phishing and other fraudulent attacks, or limit the types of content end users can access. If an operator has deployed AdaptiveMobile's platform, an IT administrator in a company can set and manage such controls down to the level of individual users. For the mass market, AdaptiveMobile's product allows operators to notify a user by text message if their phone becomes infected with a virus and offer a download, either for free or for a fee, to disinfect the device. Without such software, operators will replace a user's device or ask them to send it off for disinfection, both costly propositions. A network-based security mechanism offers some advantages over anti-virus software that sits on the handset, Burke said. Handset software doesn't prevent phishing and other nonviral scams. In addition, anti-virus software isn't compatible with all phones, making it logistically difficult for the software developers to tweak their products for each version of every phone and make sure to sell the proper software to end users. He calls anti-virus software on the handset "the minimum acceptable response. It's a tick in the box to make people feel comfortable." Some developers also sell security mechanisms that sit in the phone's hardware. Such solutions are ideal for organizations with very strict security requirements, such as government users, Burke said. One downside to the hardware-based solutions is that they take about two years to make it into a handset, he noted.
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InPro's internet-by-mobile IP should be revoked, says judge Research in Motion (RIM) has defeated an attempt by a European intellectual property licensing company that the BlackBerry maker had violated a patent for accessing the internet on mobile devices.â¦
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The second lengthy&#160;BlackBerry outage&#160;in less than a year has one consulting company advising clients not to rely solely on the popular smart phones for critical e-mail messages.Enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Tuesday, in the wake of a crash that lasted about three hours on Monday. They should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message, Dulaney said.Late Tuesday, RIM said the outage was caused by a problem with an internal data routing system in the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had recently been upgraded. That upgrade was part of an ongoing expansion of the network, and this type of change had been done previously with no problems, it said.Monday&#39;s failure followed&#160;a longer outage in April 2007&#160;that RIM attributed to a problem with a minor software upgrade and a subsequent glitch in a failover process.There are about 12 million BlackBerry users worldwide, on a variety of mobile carriers. The crash Monday affected users throughout the U.S. and Canada, preventing them from sending or receiving e-mail or carrying out some other functions, though&#160;no messages were permanently lost, according to RIM.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney had harsh words for RIM, saying he had given the company a break after last year&#39;s failure.&quot;This does not appear to be a mission-critical system with the highest service-level agreements, and therefore, to entrust ... that a message will get to the end point is being a bit foolhardy,&quot; Dulaney said. He advises enterprises that are worried about dependability to ask RIM for details of its backup system and make their own decisions.After last year&#39;s outage, RIM said it would enhance aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes.&quot;RIM has made significant investments to improve its system recovery infrastructure and processes over the last year, which enabled service levels to return to normal quickly,&quot; the company said Tuesday.&quot;They obviously didn&#39;t do as deep a dive as they needed to on disaster recovery issues,&quot; Dulaney said. But he acknowledged the failure could have been caused by something completely unexpected.The BlackBerry, which RIM introduced in 1999, quickly became the most popular tool for mobile &quot;push&quot; e-mail that automatically comes to a portable device with a wireless network connection. All current BlackBerry models are also phones, and the company now offers a wide variety of handsets with consumer-oriented features such as cameras, Web browsers and social-networking capabilities. But to get to and from the handhelds, e-mail messages traverse a complex system involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operation centers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies.Adding consumer features and keeping up with rapid customer growth, such as adding 1.65 million users in the quarter ended last Dec. 1, have probably made it harder for RIM to keep its network running smoothly, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. But users accept some level of risk if they want such complex services at reasonable prices, he said. The only truly reliable system is the public switched telephone network, and it has limited functionality, Lin said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney acknowledged that competitors, such as Visto and Good Technology (now owned by Motorola), are probably not significantly more dependable.It wouldn&#39;t be impossible to make the RIM network more reliable, the analysts said.&quot;They have the technical capability to spend more and make it more reliable, but is that what their owners and shareholders really want?&quot; Lin said.Google, for example, has a more highly distributed network, but that would take money and time, and many customers wouldn&#39;t want to pay for it, Dulaney said. In the future, RIM may choose to create a higher-end service with greater service assurances and a higher price, he said.
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BlackBerry handhelds have been called addictive, invasive, wonderful &#151; and now, a threat to French state secrets.
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A major service outage afflicts users of BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday. AT&T and Verizon Wireless say manufacturer RIM told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.
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Watch a movie or make a mobile phone call. Soon, in France, you might not be able to do both at once.
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Research In Motion (RIMM), maker of the popular BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, got mixed news in court Tuesday - and a worst-case scenario that would stop BlackBerry sales in the USA.
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Email and Internet service to notoriously addictive BlackBerry cellphones in North America stopped working for several hours on Monday.
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Research In Motion (RIM), the manufacturer of the popular Blackberry mobile, has been left with a curate&#39;s egg to mull over for Christmas.
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It may be wishful thinking, but a  Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its  employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry  smartphones at night or on weekends and holidays.
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A major outage hit BlackBerry users in  North America on Monday, cutting off wireless e-mail for  everyone from busy executives to political campaign staff on  the eve of three U.S. presidential primaries.
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Celltrust developed its SecureSMS application so banks could deliver secure text messages to their customers&#39; mobile phones -- but the company&#39;s chief technology officer wonders whether French president Nicolas Sarkozy might like a copy of the software.Sarkozy sued a French magazine on Thursday for publishing a message it alleged he had sent by SMS (Short Message Service) to his ex-wife just days before his marriage to singer Carla Bruni earlier this month. The president accused the magazine of falsification, use of false documents and possession of stolen goods.If a text message is sent using SecureSMS then even if the phone is stolen, the secured messages on it cannot be read, Celltrust CTO Houman Shafiezadeh said at a press event in Barcelona, on the eve of the Mobile World Congress.That&#39;s because SecureSMS encrypts messages before transmission using a key unique to the sender, decodes them at a secure gateway and reencrypts using another key for delivery. A special application on the sender&#39;s and the recipient&#39;s phones stores the encrypted message, and will only decrypt and display it if the appropriate password is provided.SecureSMS can encrypt messages sent between two cell phones as long as both subscribers have set up accounts with Celltrust, Shafiezadeh said.Celltrust&#39;s target market, though, is big business: it hopes that banks will use its gateway and application software to secure the messages they send out to customers. The software has other advantages for banks: it provides confirmation of the reception and opening of secured messages, showing that whoever holds the phone also has the password.These confirmations, however, are sent by SMS and paid for by the phone subscriber. That makes the application more suitable for customers on tariffs allowing unlimited text messages.&quot;If you&#39;re paying 10 cents a message, I wouldn&#39;t recommend it,&quot; Shafiezadeh said.Celltrust is in talks with a number of U.S. banks to roll out the software in trials, he said. Finding enough customers with the right kinds of account, phone and SMS tariff is slowing things down, he said. Once the banks have identified the customers, the company will invite them to download the application, so that it can fine-tune the delivery process. The trials should begin in March, with a commercial service up and running by September, he said.The SecureSMS software is initially available as a J2EE applet for phones capable of running Java applications. Other versions, for Microsoft&#39;s Windows Mobile and for Qualcomm&#39;s Brew platform, will soon be ready.After that, Shafiezadeh said, it will be a race between Celltrust coders producing versions for Google&#39;s Android platform -- for which there is an SDK (software development kit) but no phones -- and for Apple&#39;s iPhone, on the market for almost eight months but with no official SDK available yet. That&#39;s frustrating for Shafiezadeh because Celltrust has issued its employees with iPhones.Other companies offer secure SMS tools, but for more limited ranges of handsets. Kryptext, in Brighton, England, offers an application by the same name that works only on phones running Symbian OS, while Finnish handset maker Benefon (now GeoSentric) offered handsets that could send encrypted text messages back in 2003.The Mobile World Congress, at the Fira de Barcelona, runs through Thursday.
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The French Government has moved to appease cinema and theatre patrons who complain about the shrill ring tones and incessant beeps from mobile phones.
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Do your employees have a "Crackberry" problem? Their compulsive BlackBerry monitoring could backfire on you: Checking e-mail via BlackBerry gives employees a sense of control but leads to more stress, according to a recent study from the MIT Sloan School of Management that examined BlackBerry use and organizational behavior. And this problem starts at the top.
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France's Ministry of Health made a statement yesterday warning citizens not to use their cell phones too much, although actual data on specific health risks remains inconclusive.