Research in Motion (RIM) has issued a collection of security patches for flaws that could let hackers take over its BlackBerry smart phones.

According to the official advisory: “Multiple security vulnerabilities exist in the PDF distiller of some released versions of the BlackBerry Attachment Service. These vulnerabilities could enable a malicious individual to send an email message containing a specially crafted PDF file, which when opened for viewing on a BlackBerry smartphone, could cause memory corruption and possibly lead to arbitrary code execution on the computer that hosts the BlackBerry Attachment Service.”

The good news is, the flaws are in the enterprise servers that connect corporate BlackBerry users to their offices, not in the phones themselves.

It’s ironic that RIM is faced with a major security challenge at the same time as a controversy simmers over U.S. President-elect Barach Obama being forced to give up his personal BlackBerry — a stalwart companion throughout last year’s Presidential election campaign — because U.S. security officials say it’s not secure enough for a President to use.