Elysium Experts Featured on "Good Morning America" Story on Cell Phone Forensics and Data Privacy

In the News

Digital Forensics

October 09, 2014

Elysium Digital was featured this morning on “Good Morning America” in a story about cell phone data privacy and security. The segment warned consumers that hackers can easily find personally identifying information on lost, stolen, or recycled phones, and that data can be retrieved even from phones that have supposedly been “wiped.”

Jason Eaddy, the head of Elysium's Forensics and Discovery Practice, and Mike Perry, a Computer Forensic Analyst at Elysium, were featured in this story.

In the study described in the segment, Elysium analysts legally acquired over 150 secondhand smartphones, including iOS, BlackBerry, and Android devices. Using a combination of standard and experimental forensics techniques and without even circumventing device security, they were able to find what Jason Eaddy described as “pretty disturbing personal information—Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, even passwords” in about half of the operational phones. Elysium analysts also found employer data, medical information, location data, and other clearly private information.

This research demonstrates that consumers have more information about themselves than they realize on their phones, and that they risk exposing that information when selling or giving away their devices. Consumers should make sure that they have carefully followed manufacturers' instructions for erasing all data from their devices. Using a GMA producer’s phone, Mike Perry showed correspondent Gio Benitez that simply resetting a phone doesn’t wipe information off the device.

While primarily consumer-focused, the GMA story highlights an important aspect of Elysium’s work. Elysium's computer forensics team regularly preserves, analyzes, and testifies on electronic evidence (in quantities as small as a single USB stick and as large as 100+ terabytes of corporate data) in connection with litigation, investigations, breaches and regulatory response cases. For clients in industries such as finance, health, retail, government, and computer engineering, the evidence we process goes beyond data found directly on devices—Elysium's data analytics team has also mined social networks and cloud systems. Finally, Elysium's computer science team has a special affinity for smartphones, having served as experts in more than 30 intellectual property disputes involving the major smartphone operating systems.

Elysium's forensic, security, and privacy services stand ready to help assess the risks associated with data retention, or, in the worst-case scenario, provide assessment and expertise in the aftermath of a data breach. For more information about how Elysium can assist you or your clients in a forensic, security, or privacy matter, please contact us.

Update: Following the airing of the cell phone security segment on "Good Morning America," Elysium President Christian Hicks appeared in a similar feature on Boston's WCVB NewsCenter 5 in Boston.

Echoing the advice offered by Elysium on GMA, Christian admonished consumers who might be selling old cellular phones to first carefully follow manufacturers' instructions for wiping all data from the phones. "Resetting the device," he noted, "is actually in many ways the most dangerous thing to do, because it makes the device look like it's clean."

Watch the video below: