There's been a lot of talk about the need to properly dispose of PCs and servers lately, with the most recent advice focusing on actually hammering the equipment into shards of metal. Now comes news of the data security risk involved with the disposal or sale of handheld devices. Mobile security software provider Trust Digital says that a great deal of financial data, for example, is often retained in a device's flash memory and stays there after it's disposed of because enterprises aren't doing advanced hard resets to erase the memory. In a sampling exercise, the vendor says that it recovered 27,000 pages of confidential data from nine out of 10 handheld devices bought over an online auction site.

For more on the handheld data risk:
- get the lowdown at Vnunet