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The research team, which included Edith Cowan University of Australia and BT, revealed some early results yesterday in news reports by the BBC and British television affiliates.
To read more about the research go here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/8036324.stm
and here:
http://www.darkreading.com/security/storage/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217400054&cid=nl_DR_DAILY_H
Chris Ogle (29) from Whangerei, New Zealand has stumbled across the sensitive military details of U.S. military personnel after purchasing a secondhand MP3 player in Oklahoma, USA. He discovered around 60 sensitive military files dating from 2005 on the used music player. The files were clearly marked as ’secret’ and contained the phone numbers of numerous soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
For more on the story visit:
In a previous post http://www.mysecured.com/?p=202 I showed that your data is not wiped when you do a normal restore. So in this post I will show you some of the ways you can wipe your phone with some degree of certainty that the information on it is wiped.
If you want to wipe your iPhone before you sell it on eBay or give it back to Apple because the touch screen stopped working all of a sudden! Then here are the different ways you can wipe it:
- Jonathan Zdziarski’s method:
http://www.zdziarski.com/papers/wipe.html
It involves jailbreaking and command line access. It is best suited for people with jailbroken iPhones and are really paranoid and control freaks!
- Rich Mogull’s (securosis.com) method:
http://securosis.com/2008/05/20/formatting-an-iphone-to-wipe-data/Which is an easy to do 2 restores and 3 overwrites of the iPhone device’s user data area. Look at this video from CNET on youtube:
- BigBoss Wipe App Method:
http://sleepers.net/news/?p=174
This needs the iPhone to be jailbroken as well. It does a zero out wipe on the device, so it will require a restore afterwards.
The basic idea of all of the methods is to overwrite the data in the user area. Be it by overwriting it with music as in Mogull’s method or by using a wipe tool as with BigBoss or by overwriting it with zeros as in Jonathan’s method. I prefer the latter two methods as overwriting with music might leave some of the data intact (call me paranoid!). But on the other hand it could be the only option for people who do not want to jailbreak their iPhone or do not have the technical expertise to do so.
UPDATE (28 August 2008):
iPhone software 2.0 and above comes with an erase all feature that was not available in previous versions of the iPhone and therefore this feature can be used to completely wipe the iPhone. This can be done on the iPhone itself without needing to connect it to iTunes.
So, on the iPhone tap Settings -> General -> Reset and then select the “Erase All Content and Settings” option from the buttons shown. Users must note that under the 1.x iPhone software, invoking this setting erased the iPhone’s obvious data, but not did NOT PERFORM A ‘bit-by-bit’ WIPE. Under the 2.0 software however, you get a much more thorough wipe (bit-by-bit). which can take an hour or two to complete depending on the storage size of the iPhone being wiped.
According to Jonathan Zdziarski:
A detective from the Oregon State Police notified me this afternoon that an out-of-the-box refurbished iPhone he purchased contained recoverable personal data including email, personal photos, and even financial information which he was able to recover using my forensic toolkit.
So, if you have to return your iPhone to an Apple or AT&T store and they offer to replace it with a new one, make sure that you wipe your data properly first. A proper bit level wipe is needed here and NOT a system restore!
This is a stand-alone hard disk wiper! No computer needed. Wiebetech’s pocket-sized eRazer erases at a rate of 35MB/s, effectively wiping a 250GB hard drive in under two hours. The eRazer meets the DoD erasing standerds and sells in two versions one for $99 and the Pro which supports SATA and Multi-pass sells for $150… Cheap!
