Blackphone has already been cracked

Blackphone has already been cracked

A hacker by the name of Justin Case has managed to crack the Blackphone within five minutes. Not that it is so important that a phone is cracked. One would be surprised if it weren’t cracked. The interesting part is that the Blackphone is supposed to be based on security (and hence privacy); and cracking it within five minutes doesn’t seem secure enough.

Geeksphone and SGP Technologies, the joint-venture behind the release of the Blackphone, have already patched some of the exploits, and the rest are under way. It should be noted that it is only

possible to crack the phone with the knowledge of the user, so remote access seems not to be possible (yet?). Justin Case tweets that he will attempt at cracking the Blackberry now; if he succeeds, that will be another blow against the company that is slowly recovering. Then again, Blackberry is not based on an open system as Android.

So here comes the interesting point, how much does a secure phone matter? There many important issues regarding security that deserve our attention instead of which program can track your behavior in order to serve targeted ads (e.g. the way we treat others). Don’t get me wrong, saying that there are worse things, does not mean that we should stand idly by with lesser wrongs. But perhaps we should be clear to ourselves what really matters to us: and this is quite a personal question to have a solution for.

In case you were wondering, Justin Case did get a lovely t-shirt as a reward, though he doesn’t seem to be very pleased about it.