One fine day, someone gifts you a smartphone or you are fed up with your old phone and decide to resell it either to get rid of it for a better one or just because it is an extra piece and you don’t like kicking around or collecting smartphones. Whatever be the case, the first thing you go for is the factory reset option. You clear the memory of your companion who safely locked away all your secrets for quite some time. You feel relieved and safe as your data is safely backed up with you (only!). You might have gone through this process several times relieved that you can walk away, safely since factory resetting clears the internal SD card of your device and all data are gone for good. At least this is the theory. However recent studies reveal that they might just stay as theories.
Researchers from Cambridge University recently tinkered with about 22 smartphones of various manufacturers, running android 2.3 to 4.3 which revealed that a factory wipe leaves some data locations intact. Remote wipe features for lost and stolen phones are also subject to these flaws. The flaws are due to technical issues, as the device may just not have the proper drivers to completely remove partitions. To make things worse, the left out partitions are those to where some sensitive data that are supposed to be private, finds its way. The amount of data that can be potentially recovered from these partitions are quite worrying. Some store contact information and some have old photos and videos. Some partitions storing your bank account and credit card information for third party apps are also found intact. Hackers can easily get access to private business networks exploiting this flaw, and could prove a threat to corporate security. An experienced hacker won’t find it as much of a problem to crack the encryption key that results from the data wipe. It is also subject to bruteforce attacks.
The most frightening thing is yet to come. The researchers were able to find the master key that android uses to authenticate with google services, intact, which gives them the ability to resync a device with the data backed up with google which puts social security in a hell lot of jeopardy.
Findings are that more than 500 million users may already be affected, their sensitive data not fully wiped out from their old phones. There is no news of similar flaws in android 4.4 and 5 devices. They are less likely to be immune to the problem, unless the flaw was detected earlier and kept a secret.
The saddest thing is the fact that we are not left with much options to prevent this as for now. There is only a few things we can do to prevent sensitive data from falling into wrong hands. Because of its compromised security, it is better to turn off encryption, which will perform a wipe anyway. And we can use a very long and random unlock code just before wiping the device inorder to protect it from bruteforce attacks. Another extreme suggestion is to destroy your device once you are done with it, instead of reselling, which does not even qualify as a suggestion to most users but will sure save their privacy. Google is still to respond on these findings.
If you are planning to get rid of an old Android device, what is the best way to make sure your data is as safe from recovery as possible. At this point the best recommendation is to turn on full-disk encryption before getting rid of the device and adding a randomly generated password that includes numbers, upper- and lower-case letters, and symbols, and has a minimum of 11 characters. virtual data room reviews
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