Android's Factory Reset leaves Data Recoverable

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Ink

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Avast discovered that Android's factory reset option leaves deleted data in a recoverable state.

A new study from security software vendor Avast calls into question the effectiveness of Android's factory reset option, which many people have relied upon to delete personal data from their old smartphones before reselling or making a charitable donation with the old device.

Avast -- known for its security software on Windows, Mac, and Android -- purchased 20 Android smartphones from eBay, which has around 80,000 used smartphones for sale at any given time. Among the data that Avast employees recovered from the phones were more than 40,000 photos -- including 250 nude male selfies -- along with 750 emails and text messages, 250 contacts, the identities of four phones' previous owners, and one completed loan application.

The problem, as Avast mobile division president Jude McColgan told CNET, is that people still aren't used to considering the implications of all the personal data stored on a smartphone.

"Users thought they were doing a clean wipe and factory reinstall," he said, but the factory reinstall is cleaning phones "only at the application layer."

Find out more: Avast Blog

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Cowpipe

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Jun 16, 2014
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Take this item on Ebay for example, the seller has listed the Iphone for spare parts as they have lost the apple ID and password. I won't list any specific software here, but a quick Google search will confirm it is incredibly easy to access the data on the phone. There are a ton of these kind of listings with everything from broken Iphones, Androids and Laptops, every one containing stashes of undeleted data or so called "invisible data" (physical data, simply marked as free space).

There are far too many people who's phone or laptop or whatever becomes worthless the moment it stops working, so they just sell it without a second thought about the kind of data that's left on there. When I was teaching myself digital forensics, these broken products were perfect for testing data recovery methods, and pretty cheap too (if you search misspellings and use auction sniping, you can get some great deals).
 

ZeroDay

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I use TWRP recovery on my device to perform a full wipe. If I have to return it to stock I do so by flashing a brand new factory image via ADB.
 
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