Pocket PC Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

" 42Gears has released SureLock Studio, a product aimed at enterprises using Windows Mobile devices. SureLock locks down Windows Mobile devices into kiosk mode and helps enterprises increase their mobile workforce productivity and reduce regular device maintenance. In recent times Windows Mobile has become quite popular among companies to deploy and run their business applications. Windows Mobile is a generic operating system and therefore provides opportunities to employees to use the device for entertainment and gaming purposes (browsers, audio players, games, phone etc) which results in wastage of crucial working hours. Besides, accidental corruption of device settings by employees can cause critical business applications to fail."

Want to suck the little bit of enjoyment your employees may have using a company issued device away from them (Namely solitaire)? Well then here's a product for you. Lock down that sucker so your automatons can work at peak potential, without bothersome free thought or expression...

OK, in all seriousness, I'm sure there are IT managers who pull their hair out with users who muck up devices with software they shouldn't be running, and somehow mess up things they should be, and even do spend way too much time indulging the solitaire addiction. And if you're one of them, SureLock looks like it may be a relief.

"Demonstrations at the Black Hat computer security conference revealed that smartphones based on iPhone OS, Android, and Windows Mobile are indeed vulnerable to hacking via SMS messages. Those aren't the only phones that are vulnerable, though, and security experts are working with mobile carriers and handset vendors to patch the problem."

It looks like a general security breach in how almost all phones handle SMS. I'll be curious to see what patch is necessary and how far back Microsoft and their partners will go to fix the problem. My guess is, WinMo 5 devices won't get any on-device fix. We'll see. Because it involves the way SMS messages are crafted, it is possible the network could be modified to detect and trap the messages rather than allowing them to make it to your phone.

"Often the best ideas are the simplest. A laptop which locks itself as you walk away with your Blackberry® or iPhone™ and unlocks as you return. Cool, easy, secure! Just think of the benefits: One: More security - Freeze is designed to lock an XP or Vista based laptop when you walk away from it and unlock it when you return. All you need to activate the service is a Bluetooth® enabled mobile phone. Once you step out of the "zone of safety" your laptop is locked and your data is safe."

On the surface this looks pretty cool, I've seen versions of this idea using proprietary hardware, but letting it use a Bluetooth device you already have is a unique way to deal with it. Probably more than adequate for the home user, but without some further research, I'm not sure Bluetooth security is robust enough to make this the only form of authentication used on a corporate network. However, as part of a well-designed multi-factor authentication system, it certainly has potential. Notebooks.com has a video showing how this works.

"We are a team of security researchers, software developers, and mobile technology fanatics who want to help make the mobile world a safe place to work and play. Our team is primarily comprised of very technical folks who want to take on the challenge of developing security solutions for the next generation of computing devices. Most importantly, we are the kind of people who love building great products that are as easy to use as they are advanced in how they keep you safe."

Flexilis is a new security suite that is designed to protect your data from malware, viruses, theft or loss. It is in beta right now. To find out more, or to sign up for the beta, head over to their site.

If you're trying to log into our forums and having trouble, here's why: there are some individuals going around and running scripts against vBulletin installs, specifically looking to hijack user accounts where the username and password are the same. These people then use these hijacked accounts to send our spam private messages and email messages (I've turned off the email function on our board). I was shocked to learn that we have 559 users who have done exactly that: chosen their password to match their user-name. Not only is this bad security, it leaves the door open for hacker-types to get into our board, pretending to be real users, and cause problems. To prevent this, what we've done is randomize the passwords for the 559 users who were impacted by this.

If you're one of these users, all you need to do is use the Lost Password Recovery Form to have the password sent to you - which you'll then want to reset the password to something else...something other than your user name of course. If you have any trouble with this process, please contact me and I'll manually reset your password. I apologize for any hassle this may cause, but this step was necessary to protect the security of all our users.