[ news_security_news ]
Buying And Selling Personal Info With Smartphones And PDAs
Chris Crum
Staff Writer
2006-08-31
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
eBay-related security stories seem to be a common theme lately. This one in particular concerns the sale of smartphones and PDAs on eBay.
Mobile security software provider Trust Digital has issued a warning that these devices being bought and sold on eBay are supplying hackers and data thieves with compromising information.
The devices often have sensitive information such as bank records and personal as well as corporate text messages and emails stored on them. The company writes:Trust Digital engineers recovered nearly 27,000 pages of personal, corporate, and device data from nine of 10 mobile devices purchased through eBay for the project, including a smartphone sold by an employee of a major corporation. The salvaged data included personal banking and tax information, corporate sales activity notes, corporate client records, product roadmaps, contact address books, phone and Web logs, calendar records, personal and business correspondence, computer passwords, user medication information, and other private, competitive or potentially damaging material.
The information was retained in the flash memory of the devices because of users' failure to perform the advanced hard reset required to delete the data. The nine devices with retrievable data included those belonging to a former employee of a publicly traded security software company, an employee of a web services firm, and a corporate counsel of a multi-billion dollar technology company serving the legal market. The tenth device in the test was never used. Of course eBay isn't the only way of buying and selling these devices, and the problem would apply to any method.
"The general public needs to immediately be made aware of this fact. Whether you're talking about pilfering an individual's private files or stealing corporate secrets, this adds up to a very real data theft epidemic," says Trust Digital CEO Nick Magliato.
Tag: mobile, security
Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Yahoo! My Web |  Furl
Get all the updates in RSS: 
About the Author:
Chris Crum is a staff writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
More news_security_news Articles
Insider Reports RSS Feed
|
|
iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Archive
