Smashing smartphones

Kroll Ontrack engineer, Michael Chiswick, said: "We ran over the Sony Ericsson E10i with a car then used a hammer. The phone was still working, although the screen was cracked.."He said Kroll Ontrack was able to find 150 contacts and 3000 SMS messages on the internal memory. "It took only minutes to recover data via USB."

The reason Kroll Ontrack could get at the data so easily was because the phone had not been reset using the Factory Reset option, therefore recovery of contacts and SMS was based on extraction from the smartphone onto a PC.