By | No Comments
Last updated: Tuesday, November 4, 2008

The sales director of a large Japanese company thought he was doing a good deed when he donated his BlackBerry for recycling. But later a group of British and Australian researchers discovered the device and found it still contained sensitive data, including bank account numbers, a business plan for his organization, and the identity of his main customers. Indeed, a September 2008 survey of 160 mobiles by the researchers — a team from British Telecom, Wales’ University of Glamorgan, and Australia’s Edith Cowan University — found that one in five mobile communications devices still held sensitive information. BlackBerrys contained the most, with 43 percent of those examined harboring data that could be considered a threat to the individual or the organization. On Oct. 31, the EPA released new guidelines for annihilating all data on mobile devices, and businesses have even more reason to take notice of their cell phones’ potential threat to confidentiality — and do something about it. Too Many Standards “Companies have tended to put a lot of emphasis on how to handle their older laptops and desktops but have not thought about the fact that their phones tend to have as much sensitive information as computers,” says Mike Newman, a vice-president at ReCellular in Dexter, Mich., a large recycler and reseller of cellular phones in the U.S. “the problem is that manufacturers don’t make it self-evident how to erase it,” he says, adding that the process is different for each phone. Depending on the BlackBerry model, anywhere from 7 to 17 steps are needed to erase data from a handset. To compound the problem, no single industry standard exists for recyclers. ReCellular has created its own standard for data destruction on mobile devices and works with large companies that want to erase sensitive information from employee devices. “We’ve processed millions of phones…

Here is the original post:
The Recycled Cell-Phone Security Trap

CommentSubscribe