Re-Victimization from Police-Auctioned Cell Phones
Summary: University of Maryland researchers bought 228 smartphones sold as-is from PropertyRoom.com, the police-auction platform, at an average of $18 each, and found 49 with no PIN or passcode and guessed 11 more using the top-40 most popular PINs and swipe patterns. The 61 phones they accessed held victims' data, including a dozen with photographs of government-issued IDs, one with full credit files for eight people, and one with a screenshot of 11 stolen credit cards.
What's compelling: PropertyRoom says it now wipes devices before auction, but the researchers still found four phones with external SD cards that were not wiped, and the study traced the phones' path through laws that route unclaimed lost or stolen property to the state and then to resellers.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
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