You all know how much I love my iPhone...I mean, I consider it the greatest invention since the wheel and if I could have it implanted in my skull, I would. I call it my "Brain Pal."
Well, one thing I hadn't really considered is the way in which the little life keeper could be exploited as an intelligence source -- both for ill or good.
A Kit Up! tipster forwarded an interesting piece on how police officers are being trained to pull information on perps from smartphones -- particularly the iPhone.
Law-enforcement experts said iPhone technology records a wealth of information that can be tapped more easily than BlackBerry and Droid devices to help police learn where you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide."Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone," said Sam Brothers, a cell-phone forensic researcher with U.S. Customs and Border Protection who teaches law-enforcement agents how to retrieve information from iPhones in criminal cases.
"It may look like everything's gone," he said. "But for anybody who's got a clue, retrieving that information is easy."
There's even a cottage industry for law enforcement to understand cracking Apple's wonder device and a book on how to do it.
While the article focuses on how police and investigators can crack the phone for gouge on crooks, Kit Up! readers will probably be interested in flipping the concept on its head by considering how a bad guy might be able to find out a wealth of information about a military unit from the little bits of info contained on a trooper's misplaced iPhone.
We wrote about how more and more troops in The Zone arejailbreaking their iPhones and using them on local networks -- and with the explosion of apps that can be used for military ops, the iPhone will surely become a much more ubiquitous device on the battlefield. So it's important to consider security of your iPhone while deployed.
One thing you can do to better secure your iPhone is to enable the password lock feature and couple it with a data erase modeafter some failed attempts at breaking in. While the passcode is only four digits long (which should be easy enough to crack for hardcore sleuths) it's better than nothing.
