Friday, September 01, 2006

If You Sell Your Cell Phone - Your Personal Information is at Stake

Recently, I did a post about identity crooks obtaining "personal information" from discarded computers. Here is a press release from Trust Digital about how the same thing can occur with with some of the new "handy-dandy" cell phones out there:

Trust Digital engineers recovered nearly 27,000 pages of personal, corporate, and device data from nine of 10 mobile devices purchased through eBay for the project, including a smartphone sold by an employee of a major corporation. The salvaged data included personal banking and tax information, corporate sales activity notes, corporate client records, product roadmaps, contact address books, phone and Web logs, calendar records, personal and business correspondence, computer passwords, user medication information, and other private, competitive or potentially damaging material.

The information was retained in the flash memory of the devices because of users’ failure to perform the advanced hard reset required to delete the data. The nine devices with retrievable data included those belonging to a former employee of a publicly traded security software company, an employee of a web services firm, and a corporate counsel of a multi-billion dollar technology company serving the legal market. The tenth device in the test was never used.

The analysis highlighted the vulnerability of individuals and organizations that fail to secure the data on their smartphones and PDAs. Loss or theft of the devices could lead to embarrassment, major breaches of corporate security, or even blackmail.

Full press release, here.

Although eBay was cited as being used in the test - we should consider that cell phones can be purchased, discarded, or even stolen in a lot of places.

Trust Digital recommends enabling the "password function" on your phone and "hard wiping" Treos and RIM devices.

Of course, they recommend their services, also.

I recommend being extremely aware of what you keep on easily "transportable" devices and if you must have sensitive information on them - be very careful.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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