Personal Data theft is possible from your Apple iPhone forensic software can retrieve it
Unfortunately in this modern technological age there are many out in the world who have no qualms about stealing anyone identity. Identity theft is big business; these thieves use technology to rob you of your identity, your credit cards and bank accounts, all so they can make a temporary living off of some decent unsuspecting folk.
So just how many of you people actually use your mobile phone for other than talking? Maybe you purchase items, check on your savings and read emails, and the perfect way to do this is by using an Apple iPhone. So out comes the second gen 3G Apple iPhone and what do you do with the old one, you probably sell it on. But do you realise that when you sell on a mobile phone so many of your private details remain hidden in the handsets memory, available for anyone who has the ability to extract it.
According to the iPhone developer Jonathan Zdziarski “all of the personal information that was sitting on his iPhone prior to the erase or restore is still left sitting in the unallocated blocks of the iPhone’s NAND memory.”
This image is an actual screen capture from a refurbished Apple iPhone.
So, realising all this, what can be done? Well you could charge your iPhone with so much music and movies it actually erases all your personal details. You don’t save any passwords to your iPhone; change all passwords to all accounts. Go to Apple and get them to give you a format-type solution that will wipe your iPhone clean, and don’t fall prey to identity theft. Hopefully the second generation Apple iPhone may deal with this problem, let’s hope so.
Having said this, most ordinary people won’t be able to extract personal data from a refurbished or sold on mobile phone, and this article came about by a detective of the Oregon State Police using forensics software on an Apple iPhone being sold as refurbished. Having said that, it is better to be safe than sorry, so make sure you don’t give identity thieves a hand and get rid of all your personal data somehow before selling on your iPhone.
Source — mobilewhack
Comments
2 thoughts on “Personal Data theft is possible from your Apple iPhone forensic software can retrieve it”
Pure sensationalist fearmongering.
The same can be done with your curbside-disposed old desktop. In fact, it is easier with hard-drives: you need to run more passes of zero over-writes so that data recovery is obstructed. But the data obtained is so low yield (acct # xxxx xxxx xxxx 0836) that no identity theft can make a living on it. I doubt there is any reported instance in our short cyber-history.
Writing crap like this on a blog probably earns comparably little income as well.
cheers!
So, if I wanted to get the data off a wiped iphone how would I do it?