It is common sense that you should reset the phone to factory default values and delete all data before selling or throwing them away. However, it was discovered that this process the task fails completely erasing device all personal data.
According to researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK, more than 500 million handsets can not dispose of the data exposing various sensitive information and more than 630 million can not erase the SD card information .
The academics came to this conclusion after tests on 21 devices, purchased on eBay, Samsung, HTC, Google, Motorola and LG with Android versions of the Gingerbread (2.3) and Jelly Bean (4.3 ). Although also have examined smartphones with version 2.2 of Android, the Froyo, the devices ultimately not be part of the study because the Android features at the time a clean factory reset even mobile phone.
During testing, researchers Laurent Simon and Ross Anderson were able to retrieve personal data such as contacts, pictures, videos, emails and logins services like Facebook and WhatApp. In 80% of tested devices, it was possible to rescue the user data that give full access to Google services. Encrypted files on the storage units could also be recovered.
According to investigators some companies do not carry drivers specific to completely erase the data in memory of the equipment, which would be a possible reason for the failure.
“The vendors need to do a little more work and users need to be more careful,” said Ross Anderson Light Blue Touchpaper blog.
In the past year, Avast found a similar flaw in Android devices restoration system. Security firm bought 20 smartphones on eBay and managed to retrieve the data from the old users of the phone. In all the Avast recovered 40 000 photographs, 750 emails or messages, 250 personal names and respective addresses and even managed to retrieve data from some applications.
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