RIM has just announced that the PlayBook has received FIPS 140-2 certification, making the BlackBerry PlayBook the first tablet certified for deployment within U.S. federal government agencies. No other tablet on the market has gained FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is required under the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA). While some sites will claim that the iPad has made significant moves in government, from what we can tell it’s for very minimal use cases such as presentations and there doesn’t seem to be any significant deployment to date.
According to Bloomberg, the US Military has been testing tablets across all branches. The services are looking to tablets to replace laptops as well as paper manuals, maps, biometric devices and some communications tools. The U.S. Army is leaning toward the PlayBook because RIM “addressed security concerns from the get-go,” said Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Dosmann, who oversees mobile device pilot- testing for the Army’s cybersecurity division. Security remains an issue for Apple and may hold back wider use of iPads, he said. Continue reading ‘The PlayBook Will Be the First Tablet to Truly Enter Government’
WatchDox, a provider of document security solutions, will be announcing their new Blackberry support on July 25. With WatchDox, companies can share important documents securely with a cloud-based service for protecting, controlling and tracking sensitive documents. When the service goes live for BlackBerry, companies will be able to easily view secure WatchDox files in PDF or Microsoft Office format and document owners can restrict files from being copied, printed or forwarded and can remotely revoke access to documents in real-time.
The average consumer simply doesn’t care about security today, but they will in 5 years. You can’t go an entire week without reading a story about the Chinese Government or some hacker group trying to access an individual or corporation’s private data. As smartphones become more ubiquitous, users are going to buy more of the smartphone platform that affords them more protection against malware and potential theft of personal data.
The hacker group Anonymous has hacked into one of Apple’s servers used to process technical support follow-up surveys. The hack has revealed some 27 usernames and passwords and while the hack hasn’t revealed any customer data, it does expose internal passwords and usernames. What’s more interesting is whether the hacking team has managed to hack into Apple’s iCloud service. According to Lulzsec representatives: “After mapping their internal network and thoroughly pillaging all of their servers, we grabbed all their source code and database passwords, which we proceeded to shift silently back to our storage deck.” A hack of the iCloud service could really affect Apple once the service is more popular.
An iOS developer, Daniel Amitay, recently released iPhone passcode data revealed by his Big Brother Camera Security application. The free app uses code to record common user passcodes, and because the BBCS app’s passcode screen is identical to the iPhone passcode screen, it’s highly possible users will enter the same passcode for both. What he found was that the vast majority of users used very simple passcodes such as “1234″, “0000″ and “1111″. All told, Amitay discovered that 15% of the over 200,000 passcodes captured by his app were represented by just ten different passcodes. Therefore, anyone who steals an iPhone, has a 15% chance of breaking into it with just 10 password tries.
Now compare this to the BlackBerry and it’s full QWERTY keyboard passwords. The possible permutations of passcodes that you could come up with are so vast it’s not even worth trying. Now, there are still some out there who will use basic passwords such as “BNM$ ENTER” because it’s fast to use, but for the most part BlackBerry passwords are probably pretty diverse. Even the way the keyboard is designed means you probably won’t use “1234″ as your password because it’s not as easy to remember when surrounded by letters and symbols. What’s probably more common on a BlackBerry is a name or simple word such as “password”. Still, we’re happy to be using a device that at least gives you the option for a complex and secure password. Four digit passwords are simple to break simply by their nature of only being 4 digits.
Many of you have noticed this option but in case you haven’t, go to Options > Device > Location Settings and scroll down a little. There, you’ll see the Enable GPS option with a message that says: “Anonymously collects data to improve the speed and accuracy of future location services.” The intent is pretty clear and RIM is building a database of location data in order to be able to improve their software. RIM is explicit that the data is anonymous and give the user the ability to disable. Again, if Apple and Google had been this open about their location data collection, it probably wouldn’t have turned into such a debacle.
Read more over at SmrtGuard’s Resource Center where they’ll have regular content in the mobile security space.
