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RESETTING YOUR PHONE, or making sure it’s encrypted may not be enough to prevent your personal data from being retrieved if it’s lost or stolen, according to new research.
The findings, from the forensics team from Deloitte, found that even when a phone or tablet has been reset, both personal and corporate data could be retrieved from it. Such information could include mobile payment details, emails addresses, contact lists and PPS numbers.
The researchers tested out two scenarios. The first was a simulation of lost or stolen devices and the second was a set of second-hand phones that had been wiped. Mobile devices from Apple, Blackberry, Android, Windows Phone and a number of tablets were tested.
For the first scenario, 50 per cent of the mobile devices were encrypted and 90 per cent were password locked, while for the second scenario, 40 per cent of mobile devices were encrypted.
Under the first scenario, where the phones were stolen, the researchers successfully recovered the owners’ email addresses in 90 per cent of cases. In 75 per cent of cases, it was possible to identify the owner and recover their contacts, while passwords were recovered in 40 per cent of cases.
For 25 per cent of cases, PPS numbers could be identified as they were stored in contacts or SMS messages.
In the second scenario, which involved factory wiped phones, it found that it was possible to access text and chat logs in 85 per cent of cases, while the original owner was identifiable in 70 per cent of cases.
In 60 per cent of cases, it was possible to retrieve contacts and identify the owners’ email addresses. Researchers were able to recover passwords in 30 per cent of cases while PPS numbers were recovered in 15 per cent of cases.
According to Deloitte, the research was to determine what data was retrievable from both first and second-hand phones.
The organisation recommended a number of practices to help protect personal and corporate data in the case of theft or moving to a new device such as encrypting your device, evaluating apps carefully before downloading them, giving it a passcode, and recording the IMEI number on the device which can be used by your service provider to deactivate your phone.
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Some bigger computer companies built in items to keep the mainframes at a certain speed then charged for speeding them up. An engineer would go out and remove a part which was like a restrictor on a car thus allowing the computer go faster. Charging plenty of money for doing so.
Most things have built in obsolescence now.
But car companies do the same thing. Same engine giving different power (or emissions cough VW) outputs depending on the software. Pay a mechanic to re-map the engine to get more power and sometimes more fuel efficiency from the engine.
I’m not aware of a remap ever giving more power and increased fuel efficiency, you normally sacrifice one for the other, so not quite the same
You really wonder eh
This is why I put clean Ubuntu installations on my machines…
Installed linux mint yesterday on a VM as I normally use Mac and Ubuntu, mint is not a bad OS for anyone jumping across from Windows
I bought a new laptop from Dell recently with a “Killer” Nic. No linux drivers :( WIndows 10 makes me cry. So the laptop is using a wifi dongle until I can find time to work a solution.
Wouldn’t happen if ruth coppinger was at the helm :-o
All these things are easy to find if you have anything about pcs and can usually be fixed easily so that isnt the problem the problem is if yhe wrong person finds it
To be fair.. DELL rarely make this type of mistake
AT WORK & AT HOME!
Dell OptiPlex 7040 Series $689.00
http://amzn.to/2bQ3dBf
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