How secure is a lost Windows Phone?

[Witness]

Convinced my wife to ditch her Galaxy S3, and enjoy the interface wonders of Windows Phone. She picked up the Samsung Ativ S Neo, and did like what it had to offer. Fast forward to this past Monday - the phone was lost, and nobody returned it.

There's sensitive data on it, so how safe is it from being hacked to allow unauthorized access? Phone was unreachable, so there was no way to even do a remote wipe.

Thanks... She's back to using her POS Galaxy S3 now :crying:

 

[FinancialP]

Password locked? If so, nothing to worry about. All they can do is flash it, and no one can see your sensitive data.

 

[hacer619]

it is secure, don't worry! make sure you go to windowsphone.com and sign in with the Microsoft account used on the phone and use the wipe option so when the phone connects to the internet it gets wiped. you can also add a lock code with a message.

 

[Witness]

Great to know! I was pretty confident things will be fine-this makes me feel better. On a side note, I saw the article that Android is still leading with the most amount of malware - she needs to get off that S3.

 

[xandros9]

Great to know! I was pretty confident things will be fine-this makes me feel better. On a side note, I saw the article that Android is still leading with the most amount of malware - she needs to get off that S3.

sorry to hear about your wife's ativ.

but hey, the S3 is still a solid device. Actually, as long as she exercises a bit of common sense and awareness, she should be OK for now, its not like a full-scale zombie apocalypse, abandon ship malware epidemic yet. The malware comes with the extra freedom allowed, a double-edged sword I'd say. you can do more cool things, but then bad things can happen too.

 

[retyler]

Convinced my wife to ditch her Galaxy S3, and enjoy the interface wonders of Windows Phone. She picked up the Samsung Ativ S Neo, and did like what it had to offer. Fast forward to this past Monday - the phone was lost, and nobody returned it.

There's sensitive data on it, so how safe is it from being hacked to allow unauthorized access? Phone was unreachable, so there was no way to even do a remote wipe.

Thanks... She's back to using her POS Galaxy S3 now :crying:

Windows Phone come encrypted, so if it is password protected then she should be fine; but if she only used 4 digits to password protect her phone then it is possible to guess what the PIN is because the PIN can only be one of 10,000 possible combinations.

 

[rculver9056]

Did she lose it or "lose it"...? Lol

 

[ben55124]

Encrypted as long as the sensitive data was not on an SD card (i.e. photos). I think WP8 only encrypts fixed storage.

 

[ag1986]

Great to know! I was pretty confident things will be fine-this makes me feel better. On a side note, I saw the article that Android is still leading with the most amount of malware - she needs to get off that S3.

Windows for desktop is still leading with the most amount of malware, you need to get off that Windows machine.

See what I did there?

Just like a Windows computer, you need to be careful. As long as you install only from Google Play and keep the 3-rd party installs disabled (this is not allowed by default, option is in security settings) and not root the phone, you should be fine.

 

[thed]

I thought WP is not encrypted by default, and actually can't be encrypted unless you do it through Exchange Activesync. Did MS change that?

 

[stalemate1]

Great to know! I was pretty confident things will be fine-this makes me feel better. On a side note, I saw the article that Android is still leading with the most amount of malware - she needs to get off that S3.

And for that reason there are so many good anti virus suits on Google play. Like Norton or Kaspersky.



An idea: sell the Samsung galaxy s3 and buy a lumia.