U.S. and U.K. spies crack BlackBerry BES encryption, report says

IDG News Service - The U.S. National Security Agency is able to read messages sent via a corporate BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), according to a report by German news magazine Der Spiegel. The purpose of this spying is economic or political, and not to counter terrorism, the magazine hints.

The report, published in English on Monday, cites internal documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Governments have long demanded that BlackBerry provide access to encrypted messages carried by its email and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) services, to allow them to monitor for terrorist activity.

BlackBerry has complied in the case of its consumer-grade BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), notably providing the Indian government with access to consumer messages. Indeed, Der Spiegel cited NSA documents claiming that since 2009, analysts have been able to see and read text messages sent from BlackBerrys, and to collect and process BIS mails.

However, the company has always maintained that it cannot provide access to messages sent through its offering for corporate customers, BES, saying the encryption keys are known only to the company operating the BES.

However, among the documents leaked by Snowden are some that indicate the NSA, and its U.K. counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), can access text messages and emails sent between BES users, Der Spiegel said.

The two agencies have been targeting messages sent via BlackBerry's platform since before May 2009, when they ran into temporary difficulties that U.K. analysts later traced to a change in BlackBerry's messaging protocol following its acquisition of a smaller company. By March 2010, they were once again able to access the information, Der Spiegel said, citing GCHQ documents marked "UK Secret."

The leaked documents seen by Der Spiegel contain no indications of large-scale spying on smartphone users, but "If the intelligence service defines a smartphone as a target, it will find a way to gain access to its information," the magazine reported.

Der Spiegel said that to acquire BES data involves a sustained effort on the part of the NSA's Office of Tailored Access Operations, a specialized hacking team based in Forte Meade, Maryland.

An NSA presentation entitled "Your target is using a BlackBerry? Now what?" seen by the magazine shows what can be achieved. It contained an image of a Mexican government email, the plain text of which appears in a slide under the title "Post Processed BES collection."

Such cases raise questions for other states. As the magazine noted, the German federal government recently awarded a contract to BlackBerry for secure communications between federal agencies.

Ironically, though, other documents show the NSA is concerned about the effects on national security of BlackBerry's declining popularity among U.S. government employees. Between August 2009 and May 2012, the "only certified government smartphone" saw its share of the U.S. government smartphone market fall from 77 percent to 50 percent, the documents said.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Here's how to best secure your data now that the NSA can crack almost any encryption

The latest Snowden-supplied bombshell shook the technology world to its core on Thursday: The NSA can crack many of the encryption technologies in place today, using a mixture of backdoors baked into software at the government's behest, a $250 million per year budget to encourage commercial software vendors to make its security "exploitable," and sheer computer-cracking technological prowess.

To some extent, it's not surprising to hear that the U.S. spy agency is doing spy agency stuff but, given the recent surveillance revelations and the fact that other countries likely have similar capabilities, the news is certainly worrying. To make matters worse, it came just a day after Pew reported that 90 percent of Internet users have taken steps to avoid surveillance in some way.

[ Security expert Roger A. Grimes offers a guided tour of the latest threats and explains what you can do to stop them in "Fight Today's Malware," InfoWorld's Shop Talk video. | Keep up with key security issues with InfoWorld's Security Adviser blog and Security Central newsletter. ]

All is not lost, however. While the stunning reports failed to name exactly which companies and encryption technologies have been compromised by the NSA, you can minimize the chances that your encrypted communications will be cracked by the government -- or anyone else. Read on.

Embrace open source
Now that we know that corporations -- or at least individuals in corporations -- have worked with the NSA to build backdoors into encryption technology, privacy buffs should give commercial encryption technology (such as Microsoft's BitLocker) the hairy eye.

You're better off using tools that employ open-source or public-domain encryption methods, as they need to work with every vendor's software and, in the case of open-source encryption, can be scrutinized for potential security flaws.

With that in mind, here are some tools worth checking out:

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