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US law enforcers want to see a kill switch on our mobile phones

A posting from Naked Security on mobile phones:

US law enforcers are demanding a kill switch on our smartphones that would theoretically brick them after they’re stolen.

New York’s top prosecutor, State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, together with San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, put out a statement on Thursday about the launch of an initiative devoted to drying up the secondary market on which stolen devices are sold.

The initiative, dubbed Secure Our Smartphones (SOS), is a coalition of law enforcers from across the country: state attorneys general, district attorneys, major city police chiefs, state and city comptrollers, as well as public safety activists and consumer advocates.

The announcement came on the same day that Gascón and Schneiderman co-hosted a “Smartphone Summit” with representatives from smartphone makers Apple, Samsung, Google and Microsoft.

Schneiderman said in the statement that about 113 smartphones are stolen or lost every minute in the US, with many of the thefts turning violent.

Here’s how the SOS coalition describes this “epidemic”:

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Blackberry releases first security fixes for new Z10 smartphone

A posting from Naked Security onBlackberry releases first security fixes for new Z10 smartphone:

Blackberry released two security bulletins yesterday, fixing flaws in its software for the Blackberry Playbook and Blackberry Z10 smartphone.

BSRT-2013-005 affects both the Z10 and the Playbook and fixes vulnerabilities in the bundled Adobe Flash Player.

This raises an important question in my mind, though. Why on earth has Blackberry launched a new mobile operating system with Flash support, knowing full well the number of vulnerabilities and in the wild attacks against it?

Apple was first to shun Flash while some Android handset makers bragged about Flash support. For about a month. Then Adobe pulled the plug on its own Android package.

This seemed to have resolved the issue and HTML5 was the winner for mobile interactive content. “Winner by default,” or so I thought.

Now you might think it is a “nice to have” so long as Blackberry keeps it up-to-date and makes it easy to apply to your device.Adobe released Flash fixes yesterday too, right?

 

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