Break Out a Hammer: You’ll Never Believe the Data ‘Wiped’ Smartphones Store

[polly7]

BY MAT HONAN04.01.136:30 AM

Few things are more precious, intimate and personal than the data on your smartphone. It tracks your location and logs your calls. It’s your camera and your mobile banking device; in some cases it is a payment system in and of itself that knows what you bought and when and where and for how much. All of which explains why you wipe it before sending it off to a recycler or selling it on eBay, right? Problem is, even if you do everything right, there can still be lots of personal data left behind.

Simply restoring a phone to its factory settings won’t completely clear it of data. Even if you use the built-in tools to wipe it, when you go to sell your phone on Craigslist you may be selling all sorts of things along with it that are far more valuable — your name, birth date, Social Security number and home address, for example. You may inadvertently sell your old photos, nudes and all. The bottom line is, the stuff you thought you had gotten rid of is still there, if someone knows how to look.

“There are always artifacts left behind,” explains Lee Reiber, who runs mobile forensics for AccessData.

One of the deleted photos recovered from the SD card in the Motorola Droid.
We wanted to see what kind of data was lurking on our devices, so we rounded up every old phone we could scrounge up from around the office and asked the owners to wipe them. Our stash consisted of two iPhone 3G models, two Motorola Droids, an LG Dare and an LG Optimus. (We had hoped for a BlackBerry, but nobody had one.) Then, we shipped the phones to Reiber, who examined them to see what he could salvage from the phones’ memory. Reiber and AccessData use customized hardware and software to retrieve data. But it also sells a rig that will let anyone do the same, and phone forensics are increasingly commonplace. Courts can certainly get the data from your phone, and with the right gear, bad guys can too. So what did we find? The results ranged from not much to quite a lot.

Full Article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/04/smartphone-data-trail/

[TlalocW]

1. Lucky for me... I guess...

That my last smart phone had its screen shattered when I dropped it, and it landed on its corner on concrete. No one will buy it although I used it without incident after that for nearly two more years - screen still worked perfectly, I just had to ignore the cracks.

TlalocW