sdsd

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Blackberry Spyware update

You might have read already about the “spyware” pushed to BlackBerry customers of Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates. A removal patch has been developed to delete the suspicious code which the supposed “network upgrade”, as the initial Etisalat upgrade was termed in a message pushed to Etisalat customers. According to software development team Tbilisoft, downloading this “remove registration.bat” file will do the trick.

What to do: After downloading the above removal patch to your PC, use your Desktop Manager to reload the original Etisalat OS to your Blackberry device.

So, if you are a UAE Etisalat customer who might have installed this pushed “upgrade”, that is what you need to do. If you have only installed an Etisalat OS release, you have absolutely NO worries.

What originally occurred was this: A UAE Etisalat customer became curious of the “jar upgrade” file pushed to his device. The file was noted as “Etisalat network upgrade for Blackberry service. Please download to ensure continuous service quality.” He extracted the file to examine it. What was found was no “network upgrade” but rather several interesting class files which allowed for all messages sent to the BlackBerry to be observed by a “listener file”. One BlackBerry Technical Support Forums member described it as thus: “If the blackberry receives an email from “Customer Services” that contains the PIN, it will execute any encrypted commands contained in that email before deleting the email.” An example of encrypted command could be “start”, which would “cause any subsequent opening of a message to be forwarded to an Etisalat website,” according to the user.

Hmmm… spyware is not what we need, and if you by chance are an Etisalat customer, in all honesty, I don’t know if you can raise hell, but you can certainly use the above fix to remedy any issues created.

And, you can thank Tbilisoft for coming to the rescue.

Let me know if you’ve used this, and what you think.

*http://www.blackberrynews.com/2009/07/15/patch-released-for-etisalat-spyware-on-blackberry/

No comments:

Post a Comment