According to Drexel University study, Even restoring your gaming console to factory settings won't remove some of the data it stores. With a handful of common tools, hackers can retrieve your credit card or personal info.
"A lot of them already know how to do all this," kotaku quoted researcher Ashley Podhradsky as saying. "Anyone can freely download a lot of this software, essentially pick up a discarded game console, and have someone's identity."
"I think Microsoft has a longstanding pattern of this," Podhradsky added. "When you go and reformat your computer, like a Windows system, it tells you that all of your data will be erased. In actuality that's not accurate—the data is still available... so when Microsoft tells you that you're resetting something, it's not accurate."
But Microsoft disputed the researcher findings. In a statement to SecurityNewsDaily,Jim Alkove,Microsoft's general manager of security for interactive entertainment business said "Xbox is not designed to store credit-card data locally on the console, and as such [it] seems unlikely credit-card data was recovered by the method described,"
"Additionally, when Microsoft refurbishes used consoles, we have processes in place to wipe the local hard drives of any other user data. " He added.
Microsoft assured Xbox owners that they take the privacy and security of their personal data very seriously.
