Tag Archives: avast! Anti-Theft

Avast finds personal data on phones sold at pawn shops

Many people sell their used smartphones but fail to ensure their personal data is wiped away. A year and half ago, Avast mobile security researchers bought 20 used phones from online consumer-to-consumer sites, like eBay and Amazon, in the USA. Using easily available recovery software, they were able to access more than 40,000 personal photos, emails, […]

Avast finds personal data on phones sold at pawn shops

Many people sell their used smartphones but fail to ensure their personal data is wiped away.

A year and half ago, Avast mobile security researchers bought 20 used phones from online consumer-to-consumer sites, like eBay and Amazon, in the USA. Using easily available recovery software, they were able to access more than 40,000 personal photos, emails, and text messages.

Since then, smartphone technology has progressed and numerous educational articles have been published to inform people about cleaning their phones before selling, so we wanted to see what would happen if we did a similar experiment now. This time, our researchers bought phones from pawn shops: Five devices each in New York, Paris, Barcelona, and Berlin — and again, used widely available free recovery software to detect the data found on the devices.

infograph_used_smartphone_pk_v3 Install Avast Anti-Theft from the Google Play Store for free

Protect your phone while traveling for the holidays

Traveling can be stressful, but even more so during the holiday season. AAA projects that the number of year-end holiday travelers in the U.S. will top 100 million for the first time on record. Nearly one in three Americans will travel this holiday season and more than 100.5 million are expected to travel than 50 […]

“Good Samaritans” return lost phones from Avast experiment

Twenty Android mobile phones were intentionally lost in The Lost Phones social experiment that Avast security analysts ran for 5 months. The story is about how Avast Anti-Theft was able to track the phones and follow the journey that some of them took after being found. But four of those phones were returned to Avast […]

How the Avast ‘Lost Phone’ experiment worked

We trust our free app Avast Anti-Theft to track down lost phones, but we wanted to put it to the test in a real-world situation. So five months ago, we bought 20 Android smartphones and installed three security apps on all the phones: Our free Avast Anti-Theft app, Lookout Mobile Security, and Clean Master. Each […]

Join the avast! Mobile Security Beta test

Would you like a sneak-peek into avast! Mobile Security version 3, avast! Anti-Theft and the debut of a new product, avast! Backup? We are looking for advanced users to participate in the avast! Mobile Security Beta test starting today. This Beta test will run for a full week in which time you can give us valuable feedback that we can […]