[Security] 5 Tips To Secure Your BlackBerry

BlackBerry, the smartphone is being used by more than 4 million users worldwide for exchanging emails, contacts, surfing the internet and more. With the kind of aggressive move towards mobility, cellphones or rather the smartphones have become the keyword of future. Therefore ensuring that proper security measures are followed in order to keep your data safe from the prying eyes of hackers, crackers, spammers, scammers and all such who belong to this class is important.

In this post, i will discuss 5 tips to help you secure your BlackBerry and prevent yourself from the disaster of Data Theft.

1.) Enable Password Protect on your BlackBerry

Most of the BlackBerry users i have met, don’t have a password protection on their BlackBerry, simply because they hate the idea of typing in the password everytime to unlock the phone. But i must say, as part of enhancing security of your BlackBerry Smartphone, you must have a password protection on your BlackBerry.

On your BlackBerry, follow the menu through Options –> Security Options –> General Settings. Here, you must set the Password to Enabled. Using this menu, you can even set the number of password attempts, security timeout etc. I usually keep a password attempt figure at 10 and security timeout value set to 20min.

Here, you can even set if you would like to lock your phone upon Holstering. Set this to Yes.

2.) Secure Passwords with the Password Keeper Utility

This is an important tip, never ever save user ids and passwords in your BlackBerry Internet Browser. If you wish to save your user id and passwords, use the Password Keeper Utility provided along. If you are wondering about the benefit, its pretty simple; if someone ever finds your device, he wont atleast get the data. Afterall, its the data we are talking about in this post…right?

3.) Shut Down Bluetooth when not in use

Bluetooth attacks have become a daily talk. We hear about Bluetooth virus, Bluetooth Hacking. On Technofriends, i wrote earlier about Bluetooth hacking tools in my post titled Bluetooth hacking: Essential tools. and [Hacking] Video Tutorial on Bluetooth Hacking.

Its important to understand that on your BlackBerry phone, by default Bluetooth is On. From the Home Screen navigate to Setup Bluetooth. Next, press the Menu button, select Options. Ensure that Discoverable property is set to No. This will ensure that other devices are not able to find you when they do a search for a bluetooth device.

4.) Encrypt Data on your BlackBerry SmartPhone

Like in step 1, On your BlackBerry, follow the menu through Options –> Security Options –> General Settings. In the item which says Content Protection, set the value as Enabled. Select the strength to Strong, Stronger or Strongest. The other item available on the same screen is Include Address Book, if you set this to Yes, it will keep your contacts as well secure, but the only caveat is that when your BlackBerry phone is locked, your caller ID will get disabled.

5.) Clearing Memory of your BlackBerry Phone

On your BlackBerry, follow the menu through Options –> Security Options –> Memory Cleaning. This option lets you delete sensitive data such as unencrypted email messages and userid / password combinations and other certificate related info’s. Using the menu, you can configure your BlackBerry Smartphone to clean memory automatically when you Holster your Blackberry or when the phone is locked. You can even clean memory right from the menu itself as well.

With the above mentioned 5 Tips, you can certainly protect your BlackBerry against any kind of data theft. What are the other security tips you recommend for a BlackBerry phone?

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