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After taking advice on another thread on here, I went and bought a used phone from CEX, and now I'm after further guidance from the STW massive.
The phone's obviously been factory reset, but the paranoid bit of my brain says "wait, maybe it would be a good idea to make sure this thing is secure before I give it all my passwords and data and general access to my life."
Any tech security gurus care to tell me how I can go about that?
Buy a tinfoil hat!
Look for nudes.
I knew someone would suggest seeing what hasn't already been wiped. If I want blurry dick pics I'm sure Google will provide*.
* I don't
Charge it
The phone’s obviously been factory reset, but the paranoid bit of my brain says “wait, maybe it would be a good idea to make sure this thing is secure before I give it all my passwords and data and general access to my life.”
Factory reset it again?
There is always a risk with second-hand tech (and disposing of such), but realistically that risk is pretty low for most practical purposes. Someone could theoretically retrieve your hard drive from the local tip and do forensic analysis to recover your data for instance, but really, is that a likely scenario when a wannabe hacker could just mass-email some malware that would do broadly the same job?
It's theoretically possible that someone has sold a phone to CEX with a rootkit or similar to harvest passwords from an unsuspecting punter, but I'd hazard that the likelihood of that happening in practice is very, very low indeed. I could think of ten more effective ways of skimming passwords from a phone before breakfast.
Disinfect it
Charge it, turn it on, connect to WiFi, let it do all its updates, reset it and put your SIM card in and away you go.
Oh check for an SD card assuming it's Android, it won't get wiped during a factory reset so is the only place likely to have anything left on it.
Wire brush and Dettol
Wire brush and Dettol
Yep, you have no idea where it's been.
The biggest issue with android phones that I've come across is that it will demand you initially log in using the previous user's details and then you can set up your own account on it. I guess its to prevent phone theft. Whether this applies to your purchase or not, I don't know.