Re this odd story about a Mexican Diplomatic aide at the recent NAFTA conference stealing several Blackberry PDAs from NAFTA conference attendees. I was told by a Blackberry user that after 6 failed password attempts the units lock up completely as a safety precaution. Is this true?
I think that ours are set on the default - it takes 10 incorrect tries at the password before the BB wipes itself clean. After several incorrect tries you are told that in a few more the device will be wiped, and you must enter a specific word on the keyboard to continue; that prevents you from erasing your BB by having it jangling around loose in a purse or the cat walking on it, etc.
Note that the BB isn’t dead or deactivated, it’s just had all the data erased - like when it came out of the box. You can set it up again and it’ll be fine (we do this when we transfer a BB to a new user).
IME, it’s ten.
It is not so much an issue of locking up. What was described to me was that it wipes all the user’s data and disconnects his profile on the network.
I am also thinking some smart guys out there have figured out how to re-connect a wiped unit to a network of choice, but I am not sure if that is so.
The number of tries it takes (and whether it wipes / locks the device at all) is set by the administrator of the BES server. Most corporations have decided on a number lower, but 10 is the default.
The device can either hard lock (data is still there, has to be reactivated from the server), wipe (unit stays locked but data is erased, can be reactivated from the server) or deactivate (device is wiped, can not be restored without effort).
In all these situations, it is trivial to reinstall the OS on the device, returning it to a ‘out of the box’ state. The data is lost, however, and that is all the password is supposed to protect.