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Discarded Handhelds Reveal Secrets |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 31 August 2006 |
A security vendor says it found banking details, corporate
emails and all manner of private information on Smartphones and PDA's it
bought on eBay.
Like a personal computer, when you delete a file from a PDA
or smartphone you aren't actually destroying the data just the index entry that
tells the operating system where to find the data. So using the right software
tools, it is possible to examine the storage on a handheld device to find
information its owner thought was deleted and long gone.
A test carried out by mobile security software provider
Trust Digital involved buying used equipment off eBay and then setting the
engineers to work at seeing what they could recover off the second hand device.
It turns out they found plenty. Trust Digital was able to
recover sensitive personal and/or corporate information off nine out of ten
devices they tested.
Banking records, old text messages, corporate emails and
more all inadvertently left on the device. In all they recovered nearly 27,000
pages of data.
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.
While Trust Digital doesn't name names, one of the devices
it managed to retrieve deleted information from belonged to "a former employee
of a publicly traded security software company". Another was sold by an
employee of a web services firm, another by a corporate counsel of a
multi-billion dollar technology company serving the legal market.
The only device the researchers didn't get data from was one
that had never been used.
"Personal and corporate data is being sold on the open
market through eBay, and it's also available to anyone who finds, steals or
purchases a used smartphone or PDA from any other source," said Nick
Magliato, CEO of Trust Digital.
"The general public needs to immediately be made aware
of this fact. Whether you're talking about pilfering an individual's private
files or stealing corporate secrets, this adds up to a very real data theft
epidemic," he continued.
The company warns that users need to carry out a "hard wipe"
which properly deletes all the data on their devices before they are sold.
It also reminds users they should implement password
protection on these types of devices to protect information in the case of
theft.
http://www.trustdigital.com.
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