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Factory settings FAIL: Data easily recovered from eBayed smartphones, disks

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Dissent

John Leyden reports:

Data recovery experts have found a raft personal information from used hard drives and mobile phones purchased from Amazon, eBay and Gazelle in the UK, US and Germany.

The research, by Blancco Technology Group and Kroll Ontrack, once again shows that failure to erase data from discarded devices continues to be a problem, years after the issue first surfaced.

Residual data was recovered from 35 per cent of the mobile phones analysed. This information included 2,153 emails and 10,838 texts. In more than half of the devices from which data was recovered, it was kit where the user had attempted to delete it, normally a restoration of factory settings.

Read more on The Register.

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