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Viewing PIN logs Messages on BES

How do I view and log PIN conversation in BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES)? Is it possible? If you are the BES Administrator or experienced vendor/ consultant who actually went through the BlackBerry Partner exams common sense tell us that PIN messages and SMS are not part of BES. Hence, we logically and naturally think that it is NOT possible to log or audit it. As the matter of fact, these logging/ audit features are an exception. It turns out that BES 4.1 support this. KB05024 explains the steps required to perform just that.

Audit log location will be populated daily with folder named after yyyymmdd format.

The log covers quite a lot and wealthy of information such as “Name.ID”, “Email Address”, “Type of Message”, “To”, “From”, “Callback Phone Number”, “Body”, “Send/Received Date”, “Server Log Date”, “Overall Message Status”, “Command”, “UID”.

As you can see it raises some privacy concern and whether is a good thing to do that. It may subject to abuse and believe me not, I’m sure some corporate executives may think that PIN and SMS are safer than corporate email. Unfortunately that’s not the case. It is secure in terms of transmitting and receiving with its AES 256-bit encryption communication channel but not with logging feature tirned ON.

On the bright side, this is a good and excellent feature to log all communication for compliancy and security reason such as for the government and military, where transmission of data is viewed as serious threat. So be sure to table out with your corporate executives and make it an IT policy whether or not to include this feature, protect the audit directory with NTFS security and assigned only designated user account to it.

To organize, retrieve and make the raw/ logged data from the BES useful, readable and presentable for compliance purpose, check out this product from RETAIN. You can also watch the YouTube Ad about GWAVA’s RETAIN: Archive/Audit BlackBerry SMS, PIN and Phone calls and the blog comment written by Robb Dunewood.

 

News and Cases that involve SMS and PIN auditing:

• Detroit Mayor Scandal: Kilpatrick and Christine Beatty
• Lawsuit Reveals an Open BlackBerry: Canadian bank submits intercepted PIN messages as evidence against ex-execs

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Lamlamz