For nearly the past seven years, the BlackBerry has been immune to technological invaders such as hackers, Trojans and viruses. But all that changed Aug. 5, with a program called BBProxy, the first example of malicious software targeted toward the handheld device.

Jesse D'Aguanno, a researcher with risk-management firm Praetorian Global, unveiled the program at DefCon, the world's largest hacker convention. According to D'Aguanno, the software exploits the BlackBerry's connection to the network's e-mail server, thus gaining access to the larger corporate network. A hacker could then use this backdoor into the corporate network to stealthily move around inside an organization and either steal confidential information or destroy it through the use of additional computer viruses or harmful programs.

D'Aguanno plans to release the source code for BBProxy next week; however, he did say that for the software to wreak havoc, a BlackBerry user has to manually run the application.