eBay: hacker paradise
p2pnet.net News:- If you’re a hacker looking for private data to exploit, second hand is the way to go.
Mobiles sold on eBay, “are loaded with sensitive personal and corporate information that could be easily retrieved,” says Trust Digital, according to Contractor UK.
And the Associated Press has Palm executive Joe Fabris saying the company made data wipe process, “deliberately clumsy because it doesn’t want customers accidentally erasing their information”.
Palm makes Treo phones.
Trust Digital’s haul of PDAs and smartphones included sales information, tax details, client records, address books, computer passwords, product road maps, web logs, business correspondence, medical records, personal correspondence, user passwords and telling calendar records, says Contractor UK.
“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,” it says.
“Even IT professionals failed to wipe their systems, with the probe citing devices belonging to an employee of a major software company and an employee of a Web services firm.”
One former owner was traced as belonging to a corporate counsel of a multi-billion dollar technology company serving the legal market, says the story.
According to the AP item, quoted on the Trust Digital site, the comopany bought 10 diffeent digital phones in eBay and, “intends to return all the phones to their original owners,” saying it kept the recovered personal information on a single computer under lock and disconnected from its corporate network at its headquarters in northern Virginia”.
That’s eBay.
Meanwhille, what about all those second hand and thrift stores, not to mention pawn shops?
Also See:
Contractor UK – EBay helps spread ‘data theft epidemic’, August 31, 2006
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