That sound you hear is BlackBerry executives cackling madly. N4BB points out that hacker @TeamAndIRC managed to root the Blackphone in just five minutes by enabling the Android Debugging Bridge (ADB) without unlocking the bootloader.
In a followup blog post, Blackphone praised @TeamAndIRC for bringing these issues to its attention but also added that “turning ADB on is not a vulnerability as this is part of the Android operating system” while noting that it “turned ADB off because it causes a software bug and potentially impacts the user experience.” Blackphone also said that it had already released a patch to fix another critical flaw that @TeamAndIRC found before he even showed off his results.
Even so, BlackBerry will likely use this incident as a club to beat on the Blackphone, which it previously trashed for only offering “consumer-grade” security that couldn’t come close to touching BlackBerry’s enterprise-grade security. BlackBerry, which has recently become much more feisty and combative under new CEO John Chen, has been much more aggressive about attacking its assorted foes including Ryan Seacrest, T-Mobile CEO John Legere and even online media haters.
However, this new victory over Blackphone could be cold comfort for BlackBerry. As N4BB writes, the Blackphone was designed to “steal market share from BlackBerry” and at this point BlackBerry doesn’t have that much market share left to steal.
