Security expert Robert Siciliano bought 30 used phones on eBay and Craigslist and found Social Security numbers, passwords, and credit card details still on them. Factory resets worked on iPhones and BlackBerrys but left Android phones full of personal data. Extracting it took only basic computer skills.
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Tonight, private information stored on your smartphone and how simple it is to steal. We're talking about everything from bank accounts to Social Security numbers. Paula Evans shows us how you may be putting yourself at risk.
Today, smartphones can carry as much personal information as we used to store on our computers, and much of that data is very sensitive.
All the contacts, all my phone numbers, um, my Facebook, so that kind of personal information too.
There's a lot of passwords to my internet, um, Um, like my bank account.
This is where we found the most amount of data.
Working with McAfee, security expert Robert Siciliano of Revere tested the amount of personal information left on smartphones by people who thought they had stripped them before putting them up for sale.
What we found was surprising. People left their entire digital lives on mobile phones, including BlackBerrys, Symbian phones, iPhones, and Androids.
On eBay and Craigslist, he bought 30 used devices.
We found Social Security numbers, usernames and passwords, bank account information, credit card numbers. Found lots and lots of porn. Um, found all kinds of files that would allow us to either take over an existing account or open up a new account under that person's name to steal their identity.
You'd think it might take some sort of MIT-trained computer scientist, a real whiz, to do all this. But everything it takes to find this kind of information on a smartphone can be done by anyone right here.
Similar to, uh, anybody who has the skills to use Microsoft Office products.
Most of us know to remove the SIM card and the SD card when retiring a phone. That's critical, but it's not enough. The phone manufacturers will also tell you to go to your settings menu and restore factory settings, but even that yielded mixed results for Siciliano.
While BlackBerry did a fantastic job of removing the data, and so did iPhone, Android didn't. So we found a ton of information on Android phones.
In the past, even Siciliano has sold his old devices, but that won't happen again.
I will destroy that drive before I give my identity away for $50.
A smart lesson for our smartphones. It's pretty critical. I mean, I, I basically my whole life is on this phone. Paula Ebben, WBZ News.
