Restoring the iPhone/iPod Touch Does Not Remove All Personal Data

by Jody Mitoma on May 7, 2008 at 7:17 pm

Jonathan Zdziarski, one of the top-known iPhone/iPod Touch hackers, talks about the safety concerning issue on his blog.

“As part of my work on a forensics toolkit for the iPhone, I decided to push my test device to the limits and see whether user data could survive a full restore in iTunes. […] I first deleted any backups of my device and then forced the iPhone into recovery mode. From there, I performed a full restore of my iPhone, ensuring that no backups or syncing was performed. I then performed a basic recovery of the raw disk using the forensic toolkit I put together, and analyzed it. What I discovered was that deleted mail, contacts, and pretty much all of my other personal information was still residing in unallocated space on the device. My personal information safe and sound, and available to anyone with the right skills to recover it.”

“What does this mean? This means that when you do a restore through iTunes, it is only the equivalent of performing a ‘Quick Format’ on your iPhone. All of the personal information that was sitting on the device prior to the restore is still accessible in the unallocated blocks of the iPhone’s NAND memory. To make matters worse, the restore process is likely to restore the original operating system files over the same location as the old ones, meaning very little data is likely to be corrupted at all. Let this be a caution to everyone who sells used iPhones on eBay (or elsewhere) – you are selling your personal data with it.”

Automatic ways to remove this personal information are not known of as of yet, so we suggest that you manually remove this data by using FTP software and SSH into the devices inner files and folders.

Be careful, folks. Stolen identity is a huge world-wide known issue. Don’t let it happen to you.

(Source: iPhone Alley)

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