Edit; Blackberry as in the phone company/ OS. Not the fruit.
In: Technology
BlackBerry was an early provider of Enterprise Management software that allows companies to lock down and remotely manage BlackBerry phones in the workplace. Businesses could install and operate their own management servers. This allows the company to brick a phone immediately upon employee termination among other things. Nowadays this can be done with/to any brand mobile phones.
it wasn’t about operating system, it was about encryption that was used in devices for sms and calls
right now the same or better encryption is achievable on free messengers like signal or wire
your regular voice call and sms isn’t really protected or secured by design, so blackberry used to add encryption to it
in the past “smartphones” very closed in their ecosystems, so having backdoor or RAT on your device wasn’t a real vector of attack
right now with android being fully functional OS and iOS and android having millions of third-party apps in store, that might act as a RAT, OS hardening became a problem
Before the complete proliferation of smartphones, they used to be a thing that only high powered business/government people could afford and seen mostly as a productivity tool rather than a life partner. Many people didn’t even buy them outright and got them through their work. Blackberry was the most popular smartphone in this era, so it invested a lot in being business/government friendly. Businesses and especially governments often have strict security standards for all their electronic devices, and the makers of Blackberry (RIM) invested a lot in meeting those standards. Those investments continued to be relevant to some businesses and governments even after they lost most of their market share.
If you somehow bought a Blackberry today, it probably wouldn’t be much more secure than any other phone, but you would have a better ability to install security software/features on it if you worked in IT for the federal government or similar.
Do you mean BlackBerry OS?
Blackberries had features that allowed them to be managed by a central authority within the company. You couldn’t just install random apps from an appstore, you had to use Blackberry apps, and only the ones your company wanted you to have. You might be able to text and email, but only with other employees. This, along with built in encryption was responsible for most of their security.
There are modern apps that will allow you to lock down and control phones just like Blackberry did, and many companies employ them. However, to get a Blackberry level of control, you’d have to disable or cripple most of the features that make a smartphone useful. In particular, you would have to prevent people from downloading arbitrary apps and texting or emailing with arbitrary people.
Current Blackberry Products are just regular android devices.
The benefit that Blackberry used to give you came from the combination of their own devices and the servers running in the background and how they connected to each other. It was secure and locked down and admins had some ability to ensure it stayed that way.
Most of that is history.
There are many types of mobile device management solutions that provide many of the security benefits that Blackberry enterprise server used to give you, but it is not quite the same.
One of the things that make modern device inherently less secure is the fact that you can install all sorts of apps on them. The old blackberry phones had only their build in apps for phone, mail and some other stuff, but no third party products.
Modern android and apple device can’t possibly as secure as they were as they come with a ton of different apps that provide all sorts of extra attack surfaces and companies that you just have to trust.
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