Smartphones with Android not fully deal with the issue of deletion of data. As demonstrated an experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Cambridge to restore your phone to factory settings does not prevent viewing the data.
26 used smartphones
According to the researchers Trusted Third Party bought 26 used mobile with Android. First overwritten key areas, then restored the device to factory settings. Then proceeded to recovery.
Newer smartphones – the problem remains
Devices with new versions of Android (from 4.0 up) proved ineffective in removing data – 60% of them allow part of them to recover. When it comes to formatting the internal memory in 40% of cases the process did not work properly.
Older devices – running 2.2 – 2.3 – problem with the complete deletion of data as much as 90% were smartphones.
They read your text messages, browse mail
Does the researchers were able to take advantage of even rudimentary data? It turns out that, yes.
In 80% of cases, the researchers were able to read incorrectly deleted from the main facilities cookie Google services. Its holder can easily get associated with that email and contacts. With devices can also be read without too much trouble SMS or instant messaging, browsing history and saved passwords to a WiFi network or stored on the media files. Although data mining is technically not always easy due to the scattering parts of files in different memory blocks, especially for smaller files does not bear significant technical problems. – Trusted Third Party explains.
Encrypt drive!
Asked for comment. Google told us what are the causes of the problems described by scientists at Cambridge.
In devices with Android 3.0. the first time we introduced factory settings and Secure Wipe tool running directly on the platform. Currently, more than 94% of devices with Android operating system based on 3.0. or higher. In these devices enable the factory settings, erasing all data from the device that they can not be recovered. However, as noted Simon and Anderson, Android based also on other parts of the device and software that together form a complete tool for deleting (referred to above all Flash microcontrollers). However, in some cases, basic software and hardware does not work as expected.
Experts from Google explained to us how to deal with the problem of data. The most effective encryption.
We believe that the most reliable method of protection of personal data is a full disk encryption, which is available in more than 94% of Android devices. Encryption makes the data are protected under the same Android, and not on the basis of a variety of equipment that may not give full guarantee of safety, if there is a problem. Recovery of data from a device that has been encrypted and stripped of all the data, it is much more difficult than in the case of a device that has not been subjected to encryption. This is partly for this reason we have introduced a default encryption used in devices Nexus Nexus 6 and 9, and recommend it to other hardware manufacturers.
We would like to thank the team from Cambridge University for their research and a valuable contribution to the security of Android . Thanks to valuable conclusions from the research we continually improve the safety of the system Android. I would also like to thank the authors of previous studies on the topic – some of them refer in their studies and Simon Anderson.)
If you really care about data security issues should properly encrypt data. You can also use the applications to overwrite partitions and folders. Most important, however, that the problem described by researchers from Cambridge can be dealt with.
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