BlackBerry Security
Incident Response Team

Adrian Stone, Director of Security Response, describes how our collaboration with Trend Micro will help protect customers from malware and privacy concerns associated with third-party apps in the following blog.

As you may know, BlackBerry releases security notices to inform customers about software vulnerabilities that were identified, which we're either working to address or don't believe the potential risk warrants a security update. These notices typically provide mitigations, workarounds and authoritative guidance to reduce any potential risk for BlackBerry customers.

Given the possible privacy implications and security risks associated with mobile applications, the BlackBerry Security Incident Response Team is establishing two, new types of notices to help protect and inform customers: the privacy notice and the malware security notice.

Privacy notices are for applications that do not appear to have malicious objectives or aim to mislead customers, but rather don't clearly or adequately inform users about how the app is accessing and possibly managing customers' data. These notices provide information about an application's behavior in order for customers to make an informed decision about whether to continue using the app. In addition, privacy notices will provide information on how to remove the application, if a customer determines that's the best course of action for them.

Unlike privacy notices, malware security notices are released to inform customers about software that is developed with malicious intent, and it provides details about the malware's activities, potential mitigations and guidance on how to remove it from their device.

These new types of notices provide another layer of protection for our customers and offer additional transparency into the steps we're taking to continue to bolster security and privacy in an evolving threat landscape.