The Interior Ministry told about the rules for the safe sale of a smartphone

When selling a smartphone, it may not be enough to reset it to factory settings, since the information in the phone is still stored and may become available to intruders. This was announced on October 7 by the Department for the organization of the fight against the illegal use of information and communication technologies (UBK) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia.

"The sale, transfer, or disposal of a corporate or personal smartphone is not just a household operation, but an information security issue. A common misconception that resetting to factory settings completely clears the device's memory (and many do not even do this) creates significant privacy risks," the Telegram channel says.

As indicated in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a standard reset is not enough, since this procedure breaks only logical connections with the data, while the information itself remains in the device's memory until it is overwritten. With the help of specialized software, an attacker can restore it, the cyber police added.

So, even if the gallery looks empty, individual parts of the pictures, videos, and documents continue to exist in the memory cells. Form auto-completion data, cookies, search history, and sometimes even encrypted versions of passwords can also be easily accessible to intruders. The Interior Ministry stressed that cached copies of messages in popular applications like Telegram, Viber, and WhatsApp can also survive the reset process.

In addition, the phone stores the history of visits to places and routes on the servers of mapping services, if they have not been deactivated in advance.

"An account linked to the device (Google, Apple ID, Samsung Account, etc.) can significantly limit the use of the new owner, and authorization tokens allow access to your data even without entering a password," the department stressed.

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A code word selected according to specific criteria will help users.

Earlier in the day, the official representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, Irina Volk, warned about the use of phones to carry out a rental scam. For example, two people were arrested in Moscow for embezzlement using someone else's smartphone for an "urgent" call.

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