YOUR DELETED CELLPHONE DATA IS ALIVE AND WELL
Would you feel a sense of indignation if your cell phone or mobile device was broken into, and information which you thought was deleted, suddenly became public knowledge because some hacker decided to publish it on the internet? Did you know that even if you followed the manual’s instructions for deleting data on a mobile device before selling it or giving it to someone else, some of the data you thought was gone can in fact still be “resurrected� and read – using freely available software? A recent CNN article has pointed out the dangers that exist when such phones are disposed of. Many people, for example, have their e-mails sent to their cell phones or similar devices, and these could contain sensitive personal and corporate data that can be dredged up from the memory hardware after being ‘deleted’. Tests like these were done by a company called Trust Digital of McLean, Virginia, who randomly bought some phones on eBay, and accessed information that the original owners had deleted.
Naturally, this lead to some startling discoveries, from steamy e-mails telling stories of extra-marital adventures to corporate deals being negotiated to bank accounts and passwords. The moral of the story for us here at Absa is obvious: be very careful with mobile devices that you want to dispose of in a way that might put it in the hands of other people. If there is a risk of sensitive data becoming known, then it might be worthwhile considering total destruction of the instrument rather than making a few rand out of it. The original article can be found at: http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/ptech/08/30/betrayed.byacellphone.ap/index.html
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