A friend of mine sold her phone to our local Apple store. Apple said they will wipe it clean when they sell it. However, they did not. Subsequently, her Apple ID was hacked. Anyone know how to properly wipe a phone clean of all personal data before it's sold/given away? I was thinking of selling my old phone to Apple but now I think I'll keep it. I'd like to wipe it clean. Thanks.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201351
Steps in the link above
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201351
Steps in the link above
Once reset to factory conditions it's pretty much impossible to hack. Theoretically the drive contents aren't strictly wiped, but rather the drive directory is reset. Then iOS and the system are built, which overwrites the drive. However, the reset process will toss away the previous encryption key and scouring "empty" portions of the drive is going to be useless without the key.
As far as what happened to your friend, you're really placing trust that someone accepting a device will do the right thing. Personally that sounds like an inside job if it was hacked.
Thanks for the explanation. No doubt it was a major mistake to not wipe the phone clean first. My friend subscribes to an ID monitor service and that's how she found out the Apple ID was hacked. It's being used in India.
The truly paranoid would hope for at least a single-pass write or perhaps a "government wipe". Macs can do that with Disk Utility, but iOS devices don't really have that capability. But iOS devices aren't anything to worry about once it's reset. Everything is unrecoverable once it's reset.
Thanks!
Selling phone to Apple-how to properly wipe clean a phone before selling it
