BlackBerry Ltd (NASDAQ:BBRY) said in a blog post today that the BlackBerry BBM is not vulnerable to spam messages like the Apple iMessage citing a report by WIRED.
WIRED reported that Apple’s iMessage system is great for sending text messages phone-to-phone without having to pay fees your Mobile operator, but “Apple’s iMessage Is Being Taken Over by Spammers”.
The report said aggressive spam campaigns are random and come and go. Cloudmark, a security and anti-spam company which they say never had spam messages before but lately Spammers send messages trying to push deals.
Because Apple’s iMessage system is integrated across the MacBooks, iMacs, iPad and iPhone, it’s easy for scammers to send messages to all kinds of devices.
“It’s almost like a spammer’s dream. With four lines of code, using Apple scripts, you can tell your Mac machine to send message to whoever they want.”
All the spammers need is your phone number to send you the iMessage spam and if you’ve added your email address to iMessage, then they can get you on your email address as well.
“It’s very easy for spammers to register an iMessage account. All you need is an email address. We’ve seen spam sent from accounts registered to Microsoft’s hotmail.com system and to Chinese webmail providers such as Yeah.net.”
WIRED said that Apple is moving slowly to address this issue and remove spammers off the network. Said they reported one spam message to Apple and couple of days later, that message was still active.
BlackBerry listed in the blog post the 5 ways why their BBM is not vulnerable to spam and it seems the main reason is the fact that iMessage works off of phone numbers or Apple ID’s, anyone who gets your number or Apple ID can send you a message. BBM on the other hand is based on the “invite and accept” paradigm. Both users need to agree on being contacted before they can send or receive messages to each other.
It is worth noting that BlackBerry announced that world leaders choose BlackBerry smartphones for their strong strong anti-surveillance technology, productivity and connectivity.
Disclosure: I do not own any Apple or BlackBerry stocks and I use an iPhone 4S
