New Jersey
has a few reseller stores that offer to sell your devices on for cash. They
either sell them in their own store or sell them on eBay or other outlet and
offer cash on the day for your device. Some of these stores promise to securely
wipe the device before selling it on, but are they? If they are wiping data,
are they doing it properly?
Regular
readers of the Dave’s Computers blog will know that we can recover data in all
kinds of situations with the right tools and approach. Even when you think data
has gone forever, our guys can work their magic and recover all, or a good
portion your data within hours.
So would
you trust your old phone or hard drive to a reseller you don’t know?
If you
answered yes, you might like to read this report. It’s a study by Rapid7 that spent
six months buying devices from reseller stores and testing them for accessible
data. Of the 85 devices they bought, only 2 of them had been securely wiped
before being sold on. That’s 2 out of 85 phones, laptops, tablets, desktops and
hard drives.
The data
recovered from these devices included:
This shows
quite clearly that you should never trust anyone to look after your personal
security and privacy aside from yourself.
Data
recovery works both ways. It works in your favor when you lose something as we
can recover it for you. That’s a good thing. It works against you if you don’t
securely wipe your data before selling your device because if we can recover
your data, so can someone else with the same expertise.
Securely
wiping data is something we talk about a lot here at Dave’s Computers. Our data
recovery team are well aware of this trend of passing on old devices with data
still accessible on it. A simple disk format or delete just isn’t enough.
If you’re
reselling a phone, tablet or laptop. Perform a factory reset and/or securely
wipe the drive. Mac and iPhone can be factory reset to wipe data. Android
devices are the same. Windows devices need more attention and will require the
use of DBAN or professional data wiping from Dave’s Computers.
As you can
see, trusting someone other than us or yourself could be a big mistake!