December 12th, 2008
McCain sells off unwiped campaign BlackBerry to reporter for $20
A reporter picked up a used BlackBerry in the massive liquidation of the McCain campaign holdings. It turns out that someone forgot to wipe the contents of the Blackberry’s memory.
When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.
Many security researchers choose to prognosticate about malware as being the next big threat vector for mobile devices. Until data retention policies become ubiquitous and can guarantee 100% enforceability, data leakage along these lines will be the primary information security threat centered for mobile systems.
Adam J. O'Donnell, Ph.D. is an R&D engineer who has focused on computer security since 2000. He currently is the Director of Emerging Technologies at Cloudmark, a messaging security company located in San Francisco. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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