In a post by Adrian Stone, Director of BlackBerry Security Incident Response Team (BBSIRT), on the official blog of RIM, stated that the company advises its customers against installing any jailbreaking tool on BlackBerry products.
Further in the blogpost, is the mention on how jailbreaking affects consumers, as it voids the manufacturers warranty on the product as well as negatively impacts its stability and user experience. Also highlighted is the threat, that jailbreaking could possess, as it makes the personal data of a user, vulnerable to theft and could amplify the impact and severity of future security issues.
For the uninitiated, the term ‘Jailbreaking’ refers to gaining the root access of the device that lets user to do things, not originally intended by the manufacturers of the device. For the users, jailbreaking extends the functionality of the device, whereas for the manufacturers, it is a security risk that could destabilize their operating platform.
The process of gaining a root access of the device, where in user voluntarily makes changes is considered to be of a low security threat, and the same issue is resolved in future updates. If the user interaction is less, or where the user’s device is compromised by way of hacking into it, this is more of a serious security threat for the user as well as for the platform, a flaw which has to be rectified by publishing a security advisory, followed by a security update as soon as possible.
Although the device never gets mentioned, the post is aimed at users of the BlackBerry PlayBook, who intend to jailbreak the device, manufactured by RIM. Well, it won’t be wrong to term ‘Jailbreak’ as a meat which, for one man is food, but for other its poison.
