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Wealth of Personal Data Found On Used Electronics Purchased Online
An anonymous reader writes: After examining 122 used mobile devices, hard disk drives and solid state drives purchased online, Blancco Technology Group and Kroll Ontrack found 48% contained residual data. In addition, 35% of mobile devices contained emails, texts/SMS/IMs, and videos. From the article: "Upon closer examination, Blancco Technology Group and Kroll Ontrack discovered that a deletion attempt had been made on 57 percent of the mobile devices and 75 percent of the drives that contained residual data. Even more compelling was the discovery that those deletion attempts had been unsuccessful due to common, but unreliable methods used, leaving sensitive information exposed and potentially accessible to cyber criminals. The residual data left on two of the second-hand mobile devices were significant enough to discern the original users' identities. Whether it's a person's emails containing their contact information or media files involving a company's intellectual property, lingering data can have serious consequences."
this is why when i sell my old electronics, the drive comes out
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
a local University 'surplused' some used copiers, and found out the hard way that the hard-drives kept copies of all copies.
Really, does this surprise anybody?
Headline should read, "Most People Too Stupid To Wipe Electronic Devices Before Selling Them", and it should be from the Really really shocking news dept"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I work at a large thrift store and trust me. When the tech comes in it still in most cases has the donators stuff on it. From the hard drives we get to the routers and everything in-between.
I once bought a lot of used/returned MP3 players at auction. While I didn't get a wealth of personal data, I did get a wealth of "free" music. Based on value, I was actually paying for the music rather than the MP3 players.
Retailers don't have the resources to wipe the memory on returned devices, they rely on the people who buy the resold devices to be scrupulous.
We are the 198 proof..
The humanity!!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
There was a time when my daughter was really into blackberrys, because you could text really fast on the keyboard. She discovered that a local electronic junk store had a stack of various models of blackberry for something like five bucks apiece, so she bought three of them, and would put her sim in different phones depending on whether she felt like carrying a 6000 series or a 7000 series or a Curve.
Anyway, one thing she discovered is that none (0) of them had been wiped, and she had access to documents, baby photos and all kinds of stuff. Nothing pornographic, fortunately. At least, that she told me about.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And when they do "wipe" a device they still could leave thousands of emails behind. Some of them might even be classified.
It wasn't and required another's account removed, all of this Mexicans information was displayed down to their credit card number, and other personal info; making sure we wanted this information removed.
We did laugh at it later thinking of the problems this person would of had if we were that type.
AGAIN???!!! :/
When will this news item stop being regurgitated. OF COURSE information will be found on discarded storage devices.
We know, it's logical and expected, and we have been informed by jobless journalists a zillion times already.
Erasing isn't enough, you have to overwrite the file system with random data ..
For Android, you could do something like boot into Recovery, completely format all the partitions (except recovery), and reflash the ROM. If you wanted to be especially paranoid you could adb into it and dd if=/dev/zero the whole thing a time or two and then reflash it. Hell of a lot of work though, and typically would require some kind of rooting or alternative recovery for some of the options.
iOS devices you'd pretty much have to jailbreak to do something like that directly. I have no idea how thorough a restore in iTunes is forensically speaking. Might be good enough.
I'd be somewhat hesitant to resell/donate a mobile device. I tend to keep them around and use them until they're thoroughly used up anyway, so I don't typically have anything left worth selling/donating.
I too have bought a few random computers at thrift stores over the years, and have found enough personal data to make several peoples' lives miserable. Not really my style though; I typically wipe them as a first step. Although I did unexpectedly find an older laptop with a legit activated Windows 8 license on it that I just nuked the previous user account on and kept using, since upgraded to 10. It's still impressive to me the kind of things people leave on computers they're donating. I keep seeing the words "common sense" thrown around in this article, but I'm still surprised more people don't have it.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 was an awesome phone, up until the moment it died without warning. It was simply sitting on my desk charging one moment, and then completely gone the next. Battery swap didn't fix it.
I had insurance on the phone and ended up using it, but the phone was dead and there was no way to wipe it. I had to send back the dead one as-is in exchange for a replacement. What happened to that broken phone, I have no idea, but it would not surprise me if a pile of broken phones ended up being repaired and all bets are off.
Sig for hire.
Two years ago I bought a Certified Pre-Owned BMW from a dealer. It's basically a used car of a supposed "higher quality" from a dealer. Turned out that even though they do some sort of 5million point inspection, they forgot to clear the mp3 collection uploaded into the car's entertainment system, didn't clear the stored phonebook, nor the 10 recent phone numbers.