Washington, February 14 : While U.S. President Barack Obama's blackberry has been claimed to be a spy-proof device, the world's most famous hacker Kevin Mitnick says that it can still be breached.

He said that Obama's super-secure BlackBerry only makes cracking into it more challenging, but it can still be done.

"It's a long shot, but it's possible. You'd probably need to be pretty sophisticated, but there's people out there who are," Fox News quoted Mitnick as saying.

Mitnick served nearly five years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of wire and computer fraud for hacking into computer systems at some of the country's largest cell-phone and computer companies during the 1990s, and he presently heads Mitnick Security Consulting.

"If I was the attacker, I would look to Obama's close circle of friends, family and associates and try to compromise their machines at home. The objective would be to get Obama's e-mail address on the BlackBerry," Mitnick said.

He said that hackers might target a person with access to Obama because their networks would be much less secure than those used by the commander-in-chief.

Mitnick added that upon being armed with Obama's coveted e-mail address, any hacker might send an e-mail to Obama in an attempt to lure him to a Web site that had previously been breached in order to transfer "malicious code".

He, however, warned any potential hacker to consider the consequences before acting.

"The government would go after them full force," he said.

Obama administration officials declined to comment on the issue.

http://www.newkerala.com/topstory-fullnews-93195.html

Yeah, I am a big believer in that anything that is interactable is crackable...but I also believe that it would be insanely hard and probably not something anyone would ever do, though to be honest, I would try it if I thought I was good enough. Obama's administration is essentially saying "haha, you can't hack this" which, if I had a chance of being even a fraction good enough to get in, I would definitely try, if not devote my free-time to it. But then, I love challenges, and honestly I'm a little bit obsessive.

Is this not the point of all security systems?

As I understand the blackberry Obama is going to use (or is using) is made by a company that is has been making a version of the device with hightened security for a while. Yeah they'll probably add some more enhancements to it but as a start it's possible to buy a device with a lot of the enhancements that Obama will have and test on it (assuming the process of getting your hands on one is simple - which it probably isn't for a general consumer).

Personally I think that people are over estimating the security placed on the device, but lets face it you'd have to be on death row to start trying to hack the president. And a three year old come have come to the conclusion that it's still going to be hackable, well done to mitnick though.

I was saying you would already have to be on death row because they would hunt you down so that they could announce they caught the hacker to make things all seem dandy.