Blackberry Outage

Last night, BlackBery users in North American expereince one of the longerst BlackBerry outages in recent years.  If you were one of the unlucky people who experienced this outage you were not alone.

Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure.

This was the second outage in with a week.  For a company know for providing a reliable phone, this news is a bite of a concern to me since I depend on my BlackBerry for my business and work emails.  RIM (Research In Development), the company that makes the BlackBerry prides itself on near perfect uptime statistics voes to correct the problem.  Hopefully they get it right.  Because it really sucks when I lose my ability to text, check my emails and surf the web with my phone.

Recognzing Phishing Emails

Phishing is an attempt via email to trick people into revealing sensitive inforamtion like username, passwords, and credit cared information about them selves by pretending to be a bank or some other legitimate entity.  The emails usually contain a link to a website that appears to be legitimate and which prompts you to provide your information.

Sometimes, these emails will contain a form attached for you to fill out your information.  One common tactic is to pretend to be from the fraud department of a bank or online retailer and ask for information to be provided to avoid identify fraud.

There is also an increasing amount of emails exploiting news of interest and other popular topics to trick people into clicking on links.  One email about swine flue asked people to provide their name, address, phone number, and etc as part of the survey about the flu.  And users of social network are becoming popular targets.  As these users are being directed to fake login pages.

So be careful out there and just don’t innocently give out your personal information to anyone without double checking the request and the reason for it.