Sophos Cloud Optix
The BBC has reported that several UK police forces have found that evidence has evaporated into thin air after tablets and mobile phones have been remotely wiped, even after suspects have been taken into custody.
Confirming six such incidents, a spokeswoman for Dorset police conceded that “we don’t know how people wiped them”.
But given the ease with which users can install Android apps with useful remote wipe capabilities, or simply use Apple’s own Find My iPhone service to erase a device, it’s not terribly surprising that crooks might use this to their advantage.
A spokeswoman for Derbyshire police confirmed a similar case in her borough, saying that a phone belonging to a romance scammer was remotely wiped, despite being a part of the investigation.
Luckily a conviction was still achieved.
Cleveland police also experienced a wiped phone as part of an investigation, but couldn’t comment on whether it had jeopardised the case because it simply didn’t know what was on the phone in the first place.
Other forces to experience the remote data wiping phenomenon include Cambridgeshire, Durham and Nottingham with each reporting such an incident over the last 14 months.
The BBC report noted that one way the police could circumvent remote wiping would be through the use of a device that could block radio frequencies, such as a microwave oven or Faraday cage, which would prevent the remote wipe signal from getting through to a phone or tablet.
But that solution wouldn’t work when it comes to laptops and desktops as new self-destructing drives come onto the market, such as the Autothysis 128s and 128t from SecureDrive, which can not only self-wipe on command, but can also be pre-programmed to self-destruct when certain criteria are met, such as an inability to receive a GPS signal for a defined amount of time – an event that a Faraday cage would certainly trigger.
The US is fighting to make kill switches mandatory for all new mobile phones and it’s certain that remote wiping technology is here to stay.
Police and other law enforcement are going to need to react quickly to this new form of evidence tampering.
Composite image of evidence bag and phone and wiper courtesy of Shutterstock.
So why can’t they simply turn on “Airplane Mode” and stop others from remote wiping the devices? That would block all communications in and out of the device and allow local use of whatever they find on the phone itself.
Because if I were writing remote wipe software, I would include an option that would self-destruct if it stays offline for more than 24 hours.
Best hope you don’t have a mobile network outage 🙂
“Because if I were writing remote wipe software, I would include an option that would self-destruct if it stays offline for more than 24 hours.”
– said someone who doesn’t travel much.
Don’t most people password protect their smart phones these days.
As someone who currently has two mobile phones currently in police custody (seized during a search warrant of my premises) I think it says a lot about the accused to initiate a remote wipe. Is it not perverting the course of justice?
Or just put the device in airplane mode.
I always love reading about applications of my favorite law, the Law of Unintended Consequences. Let’s see, law enforcement couldn’t catch the crooks stealing phones so they came up with this scheme to wipe and lock phones to make stolen phones worthless. And now they’re complaining that the crooks are wiping phones containing evidence?
I related this to my lawyer girlfriend and she laughed hysterically.
Seems like law enforcement should have done a better job catching the phone thieves and getting them off the streets instead of trying to design technology without thinking the problem through.
Why not just take the battery out ? A bit more of a challenge for an iPhone but other smartphones should be easy enough ?
Crooks usually have full encryption and thats why many law enforcement agencies at least in the US try to keep the phone running but isolate it in faraday cage box.