Welcome to the August 2020 issue of the Computing Security Newsletter.

As someone looking at buying a new car and selling off my old one in the not too distant future, I was alarmed to read a Which? survey that revealed how car owners could be putting their personal data at risk by not clearing their data before selling their vehicles.

In a survey of more than 14,000 drivers who sold cars in the last two years, four in five failed to wipe information transferred from their phones – such as contact numbers, home addresses and even WiFi passwords – to their cars before they sold it.

“When selling a car, we’re usually quick to remove our possessions – whether that’s CDs, a roof rack or personalised seat covers,” comments. Chris Harris, EMEA technical director at Thales. “However, many of us are failing to remove our more ‘invisible’ possessions and, with cars becoming increasingly connected, they are swiftly becoming a hotbed for potentially lucrative sensitive data, including addresses, recent calls and birthdays. The majority of us wouldn’t be comfortable sharing this kind of information with complete strangers, so it’s concerning to see consumers unwittingly hand this data across.”

Here are his three quick tips for keeping your data safe when selling your car:
• Consider all the places where your personal information may be stored and find out from the car's manual how to delete or erase it
• Go through any accounts or apps that you may have connected to the vehicle and ensure you’ve logged out and removed any saved data
• Finally, check for old-school methods of storing data. Did you have a USB stick or CD in the glovebox with music you were playing in the car? What else might that memory stick have had on it? Even files you thought you had deleted can often be recovered from hard drives and USB sticks.
Drive safely!

Brian Wall, Editor
Computing Security

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