If you want a job done right

It's great when a phone company wants your business. Whether or not you're considering changing over, they offer nice perks. The latest company gave me an iPad and a playbook for a few days, to 'test out their network'. (Summary: the iPad is built better and more polished, but I love some of the playbook UI choices. After swiping from outside the screen to switch apps, double-tapping the iPad's home button felt clunky and wrong. But I digress.)

Before The Salesman handed over the iPad, he made a point of spending a few minutes clearing user data - it had just come from another company  Okay, he's not doing a secure wipe, but a quick wipe in each app is enough. At least they care about confidentiality.

This was the first sign they hadn't been thorough.

The best way to test out hardware is to buy miniskirts. Try it sometime. 

I've hidden one entry to protect The Salesman (who we might end up dealing with), but the search history is interesting regardless - mens fashion and porn. Later on I poked around to see if there was more.

I didn't investigate too much, but there's a good mix: email, mens clothing, ASX announcements, straight porn, gay porn, email again, and finally cruise ships. From this we can deduce he's an open minded young man who takes care of his looks, has a solid financial basis, and keeps track of his investments.

And since The Salesman didn't know how to clear all the pics, the man with the interesting browsing habits works with these guys:

It looks like he works in a car sales yard, but you can't tell much else. Most of the other key apps are clear of data, so the privacy violation should stop here.

Except the apps he installed require his account to upgrade.

This is getting awkward. The email is his full name including initials and there's only one guy in this city with that name. So that leads straight to his facebook account, which leads to his 500+ friends, his girlfriend, his family, and so on. I've never met this guy, but from an iPad he used for one day we can link his porn habits all the way back to his family and workplace, even after someone tried to wipe it.. Imagine what the phone you use every day has?

The moral of this story: Your personal data is important. Don't trust others to handle it for you if you can handle it yourself.
And Wipe your test devices when you're done with them. 




UPDATE:
Somebody pointed out that I hadn't checked to see if the photos had the GPS location they were taken stored. And hey, what do you know?

So in addition to everything else, we've been provided with the very building he works in. Awesome.

Broken Things: iPhone 4

I was browsing through some older files when I saw this pic. The story behind this phone is one of adventure, intrigue, and criminal elements leaving their murky underworld to terrorise the public.

This iPhone has a fun little escapade attached to it, in April this year.

The Owner had it stolen while picking their kids up from school - they left the car unlocked for two minutes, and came back to find it gone. By sheer luck he'd recently been travelling so we'd connected his brand-new phone to our corporate mobileme account.

 He called me about an hour later and I pulled it up on 'find my iphone'. We got occasional reports as it was driven south before the thief finally settled down for the evening at a little house in Fremantle.

I kept an eye on it the next morning, and finally got a good GPS reading that showed exactly which house it was in.  One screenshot and we were in business.

We got lucky again when we got the police involved. They apparently had some free time (and were intrigued by 'Find My iPhone'), so they sent a car around to the house. They found one elderly man and his son in a near-empty house who let the officers in for a quick look around their mostly empty house. There was no sign of any phone and the police left. It looked like our investigation had come to an inglorious end.

The next day, we got some surprising news: The phone had been turned in at the Fremantle police station looking rather damaged (see above). The man who turned it in said they'd just found it but - rather conveniently - happened to live at the same house the police had visited the day before. It seems the police visit unsettled him, so he did the logical thing: Hit the phone repeatedly with a rock, and turn it in denying all knowledge.


Where are they now?

The Mysterious Thief: I lost all involvement with the case after we got the phone back, but he was in the awkward position of explaining why the phone had been in his house and turned on for two nights before he 'found it'. I hope it went well for him.

The iPhone: One $80 screen replacement put it in perfect working condition, and it's still chugging along just fine.

Data Destruction: Hammer

If you ask for methods to quickly destroy data, You'll probably get a whole bunch of advice ranging from a decent software wipe  up to nuking it from orbit. Most of them are effective but need special equipment or hours of time. What if you want something quick and simple? Hit the drive with a hammer.

I was lucky enough to find a scrap drive pre-hammered by the prior owner, so this is a real example of attempted data destruction. I've removed the company name from the drive since I'm sure they'd be surprised if they knew what IT did with their old servers.

At first glance the damage doesn't look too bad, but the drive isn't mounting. Clearly it's time to open it up.

Look at that! Data platters in perfect condition inside a drive that spins up perfectly. The armature isn't moving quite correctly, but the read heads themselves are in great condition. Almost all the data on this drive will be intact and could be recovered by a sufficiently determined person.

A few points to note:

• They were hammering exactly the wrong end of the drive. While the drive mechanism might not work afterwards, it's a good idea to hit the end where you actually keep data.
• This drive has a single platter mounted low. Even if he'd repeatedly hit it in the right spot he might have missed the platters completely. 
• Let's be honest: Hammering the case isn't going to do as much damage as you hope because the case is partly designed as a protective layer against blunt trauma. You'd have to scale this up to a sledgehammer to be sure it works.

And because I like them so much, let's finish with a few closeups of all that beautiful undestroyed data.

Next test: microwaving your drive. If anybody feels like donating to that cause, I'll need half a dozen drives of the same model with matching firmware.

Doggy Data Destruction

Dogs like chewing on things. Electronic devices are often small and easily chewable. Hijinks ensue.

For control purposes, the following items were all chewed up by the same dogs over a period of a few years. They provide a sliding scale of how much damage your dog can do to what you hold most dear: your handheld devices.


Item 1: SD Card.

SD cards are pretty small and fragile. They're designed to go inside more sturdy devices (phones, cameras, sewing machines), and rely on the extra protection to survive. They're definitely not built for a foray into a dogs mouth.

Opening it up, you can see the chips themselves are badly cracked. Once you get physical damage like this, there's zero chance of recovering any data.

Item 2: Thumbdrive

Thumbdrives are made of sterner stuff, since they spend half their life bouncing around in your pocket and being forcefully thrust into USB ports backwards. It's hard to judge what might happen in a dogs mouth, but liquid damage wouldn't be much of an issue - I once put the same thumbdrive through a washing machine three times before it finally broke. This one had a bonus layer of metal which gave up its life to protect the delicate layers beneath.

The memory chips survived but the drive didn't mount when plugged in. Close examination revealed a few small breaks in solder, so a few minutes work with a soldering iron should bring it back from the dead.

Item 3: MP3 Player

This is a bit of an unfair example as it's an uncommon and unusually hardy mp3 player. You can see it has a thick plastic shell, with no screen to provide an easy breaking point.

This one is remarkable because of just how well it survived. The dog had been chewing on the corners for quite a while before anybody noticed, and yet the plastic is barely dented.. Every button, speaker, jack, and panel survived in working condition. The same MP3 player survived a second round with the labrador a few months later, so they must make these things tough.

I guess the lesson to take from this is if you're going to give gadgets to your dog as toys, use the biggest you have. If you change your mind, it might still work.

(Alternative lesson: If you're keeping valuable data in a portable form, find the most durable and protected device you can. You can't always predict a dog eating your portable hard drive)