Passwords Stolen from Photo Storage

What's in your photos?

Many of us take pictures of sensitive information for quick reference and we often don’t delete them when done.

Criminals have been reported using apps loaded with a virus to scan photos using Optical Character Reignition (OCR) - which is how computers can recognize text from images.

When a photo with sensitive information was found the app would upload it to the criminal. In this case they were looking for passwords to crypto-currency wallets, though it’s not a far stretch to apply this process to other types of sensitive information.

What should we do?

Both Android and Apple devices allow us to search by keyword in our stored photos. Try searching for the below types of phrases.

• Password

• Account

• Account Number

• Bank Account

• License

• Driver’s License

• License Plate

• Document

• Birth Certificate

• Social Security Card

Find data we wouldn’t want someone else to have? Simply delete the photo. If the information is needed for reference consider saving it in a password manager, which we can review my guide if we don’t have one.

My photos were not innocent during this process, but I did free up some space and deleted a lot of receipts.

Did you find a different phrase that was useful? Share it with me and I’ll update this post.