Cell Phone Secrets

Nov 1, 2006 12:00 PM

Before you list your old company cell phone for sale on ebay, make sure it has been wiped spotless — of information, that is.

Trust Digital, a McLean, Va.-based provider of mobile security software, recovered almost 27,000 pages of personal and corporate data from nine mobile devices bought through eBay. The nearly endless list of salvaged information included personal banking and tax information, corporate sales notes and client records.

Trust Digital engineers found it easy to recover the information, which was stored on internal flash memory chips (think digital camera memory cards), largely because previous users failed to execute the “hard-wipe” function needed to permanently delete the data. Nick Magliato, Trust Digital chief executive officer, says that with almost 2 billion smart phones on the market, the potential for having sensitive data fall into the wrong hands is “staggering.”

Hard-wipe procedures are often outlined in user manuals and can be explained by a vendor. They generally involve pressing only a few buttons on the device. It takes only seconds to carry it out, and could be the answer to preventing a life-changing breach of information.

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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