TrustedSource, the site maintained by Internet security specialists McAfee, are calling out BlackBerry Messenger as a potential threat for spam and hoaxes. The site is a hub for statistics gathered by McAfee and its customers, to give timely information about security threats and viruses. Their latest blog post reads:
“The new BBM also enables you to add new users by taking a picture of a barcode which is uniquely created for your BlackBerry pin. This makes it incredibly easy for people who you don’t know to add you to their contact list, which leaves you open to receiving more Hoaxes or Spam messages.”
The article suggests that you could be adding a spam bot to your BBM contact list, but fails to mention that it would be really difficult for a spammer to set up said spam bot. I think if you wanted to spam the BBM network, you would have to use an API, and a script that runs through every BlackBerry PIN. But you wouldn’t need to use BBM, you could just PIN message the individual with spam. Even doing that, you would still get caught by RIM fairly quickly, and they would shut you out of the network. So while I’m sure it’s possible to spam the BBM network, I don’t think McAfee really thought through the post and are misleading people to think it’s more vulnerable than it actually is.
