Before selling phone, we delete everything and use factory data reset that any smartphone has, but let’s take Android OS.

In fact everything is very easy, it is just necessary to press the button and all files are deleted, but it is true? AVAST engineers made an experiment in order to check whether personal user data could be recovered from phones. For this purpose the company purchased 20 used Android smartphones on eBay and then workers used widely available forensic software that can restore remote files. Results showed that factory data reset doesn’t guarantee full personal data removal.

The forum of AVAST, one of the world largest  companies producing antivirus software is currently offline and will remain so for a brief period. It was hacked over this past weekend and user nicknames, user names, email addresses and hashed (one-way encrypted) passwords were compromised.

Even though the passwords were hashed, it could be possible for a sophisticated thief to derive many of the passwords. If you use the same password and user names to log into any other sites, please change those passwords immediately. Once our forum is back online, all users will be required to set new passwords as the compromised passwords will no longer work.