Did you know? Your privacy is sold along with your old Android smartphone
According to a research by a security firm, when you factory reset your Android smartphone, your data is not completely wiped off. Your data, such as SMS, WhatsApp messages, Gmail account and much more are exposed to the hacker, which is a potential threat to your privacy.
A research paper from the University of Cambridge, which performed a security analysis on Android factory resets, mentions that Lauren Simon and Ross Anderson managed to retrieve a huge amount of sensitive data from a couple of Android smartphones, which included Alcatel, BlackBerry, Apple, HTC, Samsung, Huawei, Nokia, Motorola, Lenovo, Sony and LG. They bought the smartphones from eBay and a few recycling companies for a test.
Anderson and Lauren reported that, ‘We estimate that up to 500 million devices may not properly sanitise their data partition where credentials and other sensitive data are stored, and up to 630M may not properly sanitise the internal SD card where multimedia files are generally saved. We found we could recover Google credentials on all devices presenting a flawed Factory Reset. Full-disk encryption has the potential to mitigate the problem, but we found that a flawed Factory Reset leaves behind enough data for the encryption key to be recovered. We discuss practical improvements for Google and vendors to mitigate these risks in the future.’+
Data extraction is intentionally done by someone who is looking for sensitive information to make a quick buck. The best means of doing so, without being traced online, is to extract the privacy information from older devices, and smartphones and hard drives are the best forms of sensitive data. Since expensive smartphones have a better buy-back (resale) value, most customers prefer to by high-end devices since they can trade them in easily. So when trading in the older smartphone, one usually does a factory reset before handing over the older smartphone to the buyer.
However, a scary truth has been revealed that an Android smartphone still stores the user’s sensitive data on it, even after a complete factory reset. ‘Previous reports have raised occasional doubts about the effectiveness of the implementations of this in Android, with claims that data can sometimes be recovered,’ states the analysis report.
The report goes ahead to highlight the problem of Android smartphones and quantifies the amount of data left behind by the flawed implementations. The research reveals that a flawed factory reset allows an attacker to gain access to a user’s Google account credentials, along with its associated data backed up by Google services, such as contacts and Wi-Fi credentials. The flaw exists with android 2.3.x right up to Android 4.4.
Similar to how data can be recovered from a hard drive, the Android partitions also allow the data to be recovered, albeit with a different approach. When you delete some data from the hard drive, only the file’s information (name) from the FAT (index) is removed, while the entire data is still present physically. This can be hunted for, using a good recovery software and retrieved back in completely good shape. If the process is simple enough and data can be recovered, then the threat can attack millions of people out there.
So if you are trading in your old handset, gifting it, recycling or donating it, make sure you have all necessary data wiped off from your handset before handing it over. At present, there are no confirmed safe applications that can completely erase your sensitive data. But to be sure that your data does not get in the wrong hands, we suggest you enable encryption on your smartphone.
