EBay helps spread 'data theft epidemic'
Nine out of ten mobile devices sold on eBay are loaded with sensitive personal and corporate information that could be easily retrieved by hackers, a security probe has found.
Out of the nine devices up for auction, which included PDAs and smartphones, engineers at Trust Digital recovered almost 27,000 pages of potentially damaging material.
Their haul included a corporate swag bag of sales information, tax details, client records, address books, computer passwords, product road maps, Web logs and business correspondence.
In terms of individuals? privacy, the sample exposed medical records, personal correspondence, user passwords and telling calendar records.
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.
