blackberryI have seen many people posting their BlackBerry PIN (an eight character hexadecimal identification number assigned to each BlackBerry device) on social networking sites.
Definitely BlackBerry people should have forseen this. So are BB PINs hack proof? Has anyone heard of instances of hacking a BB using the PIN? Just curious to know.
According to Wikipedia the PIN can be used for messaging, so making it public should indeed not harm anyone:
BlackBerrys can message each other using the PIN directly or by using the BlackBerry Messenger application.
As Arjan says, the PIN used to be the main way to add a contact into Blackberry Messenger this is why social sites have an option to list it (it's still an option, but I think most people use the email address to identify their contacts now, as that works even when you change devices).
The PIN isn't like a security PIN number like the one's used as a password for things like ATMs or to unlock phones, it's just a unique code that identifies that Blackberry on the Blackberry network (think of it as more like a mobile phone's IMEI number, or a network device's MAC code).
The only way that this could make a Blackberry easier to hack is that it's a way to uniquely identify and target that Blackberry (on the Blackberry network), it doesn't give access to anything. These days I can't believe that it's of any more value to a hacker than knowing their target's Blackberry email address and phone number, which I'd assume the same people are also putting up on the social sites.
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