The Storm is a Netbook, says RIM founderOn security issuesCNET Asia: Are we seeing increasing breaches of security due to a higher rate of adoption for smartphones? Scott Totzke, VP, BlackBerry Security Group: Yes, I think we are. You just have to fire up Google, do a couple of searches, and it doesn't take too long to get all kinds of headlines. There are a lot of studies and there was one I recall being done by a company down in DC where it bought a bunch of smartphones off eBay. These were supposed to be phones that have been wiped, done with a factory reset and were going to be resold for US$25 or US$50 to offset the cost of a new phone. What they found was that all the information previously on the device was readily accessible to the new owner. There was information about corporate mergers and acquisitions, earnings announcements, product announcements, and extra-marital affairs. There were all kinds of business and personal information that could be used to exploit a company, the market or the individual. These types of studies have been repeated many times in the last three to four years and it always shows that when buying these used devices, you're always able to get a high percentage of personal information and I think the trend is accelerating. The first was a couple of years ago when they had a pretty good success rate. The last one I saw was in the UK just a couple of weeks ago, and they had a very alarmingly high success rate in getting information off these devices. From a consumer perspective, when I'm done with my phone and I want to sell or give it back to an organization that's going to recycle that, I want to make sure I got rid of my personal information and that there's no way to recover that. One of the features of BlackBerry is that we have an option to erase all of the information and we go through a process of not only erasing the information, but also overwriting them so that the data's not recoverable. Tags: Research In Motion Ltd., Smart Phone, Netbook, RIM BlackBerry, Sales
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