Hacking XBox360 card credit data

(Now you can access to the Spanish version of this post | Ahora puedes leer este post en Español)

Hi all,

Did you sold your old Xbox 360?

If you didn't hit the disc with a hammer, I've bad news for you.
Some investigations about Xbox 360 data security at Drexel University found security issues about the storage of credit card data.

Even a "full factory reset" will not be enough to completely delete your credit card data. You'll need to be more exhaustive in order to perform a full deletion.


What about other MS products?

This issue is reproduced in other Microsoft systems, like Windows.
When you're formatting your hard disk on a windows system, you will be noticed about the data deletion, but, that's true?

The answer is "NO",  during the "disk formatting" MS Windows is just setting the data as "unused" but the information remains in the disk. This is the way that some data recovery tools work, these tools will read the full disk including sectors labeled as unused.


Don't you sold your Xbox yet and you wanna erase your data?

First you should remove the disk from the Xbox360, then, I would recommend you some disk utilities like "Hiren's Boot", "Q Manager", "Partition disk manager".... all of them will perform a low level disk formatting and this implies low level disk erasing.

Now, you can sell it :)

Are there news related from Microsoft?

There are some news about this issue, but it's not very clear. Someone said that MS is investigating the issue but there are no official information yet.

We are legion.

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P.S: This post took longer because the Semana Santa holidays in Spain :)