Do you ever wonder if your cell phone is hacked or even spying on you? Your cell phone could be behaving differently or crashing a lot. Maybe you recently had a conversation about shoes then hours later shoe ads suddenly pop up on your phone. Even worse, you could be receiving strange popups on your phone requesting sensitive information.
How would you know if a hacker is tapped into your phone?
The unfortunate answer is that it is very difficult for the average person to identify spyware on their phone. You typically need sophisticated cybersecurity forensic tools and technical knowledge to confirm your phone is hacked. But there are a few tell-tale signs that everyday people can look for that may indicate phone compromise.
Poor Battery usage – Is your battery draining much more quickly than it should especially on a newer phone? Is the battery draining in 6 hours instead of the 12 hours rated by the vendor? Is a specific app using an exorbitant amount of battery power?
Do keep in mind, when you are in an area with weak cellphone coverage, your phone must work harder to connect to the network. Under such conditions your phone may drain more quickly. Additionally, streaming video especially high-definition video is energy intensive and drains battery power.
Increased Data Usage – Has your data usage increased significantly without explanation or a change in your streaming behavior, download behavior or other phone usage? Log into your online mobile account and review your last 12 months of data usage. Determine if there have been sudden spikes in your data usage.
Mystery Apps – Do you have any mysterious apps installed on your mobile phone that you do not recall downloading? Are there apps taking up space on your phone that you don’t use?
Excessive Mobile App Permissions — Do any of the apps require permissions that don’t make sense like access to your contacts, camera or microphone? Look at the permission settings for mobile apps that you deem higher risks. Good examples of higher risk apps include unpopular gaming apps or utility apps from unknown developers.
Suspicious App Behavior — Are you receiving strange pop-ups or notifications on your mobile device? Do any of your apps automatically launch or start on their own or request credentials for unrelated accounts? Do your active use indicator lights for your camera or microphone turn on at usual times?
Poor Phone Performance — Is your phone slower than usual? Does your phone ever freeze up sporadically? Also, has your phone started to crash more frequently or seem to use up more processing power?
Random Multi-Factor Authentication Requests — Have you recently received multi-factor authentication codes that you did not request? This could be a sign that someone knows your password and is attempting to authenticate to your iPhone, Google or Microsoft account.
You can also log into your mobile device account and review recent logins. Apple, Google and Microsoft all record and track login information which you can access online. Verify if anyone has attempted to log into your account from an unknown computer.
Phone Temperature — Is your phone getting unusually hot even when you are not holding it or charging it? A hot phone can be an indicator that you have rogue processes running in the background straining your phone of its energy and processing resources.
What should you do if you suspect that your device is compromised?
- Install Updates — Immediately update your operating system if you have not installed recent updates.
- Delete Downloaded Files — Delete recent downloads and cached data from your mobile phone.
- Uninstall Unneeded Apps — Remove all unnecessary apps from your mobile device. Also uninstall higher risk apps.
- Use Virus Protection — Install anti-virus software on your mobile device then run a scan for malware.
Disable Ad Tracking
Some browsers support a feature called Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement (PPAM) which is a technology that allows advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their ads that get displayed on websites. While this technology has been designed to respect privacy and anonymize information, PPAM can collect information and sometimes store information on your device. This feature also allows websites to target you with specific ads based on your previous clicks or searches on websites.
To disable Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement on your iPhone/Safari: go to Settings, then Apps, then Safari, then Advanced, and turn off Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement.
To disable Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement on Android/Chrome: go to your device settings, navigate to “Privacy” or “Privacy and security”, then select “Ads” followed by “Ad Privacy” and finally toggle “Ad measurement” to “Off”.
If you are running Firefox on your mobile phone or computer: go to the Firefox settings, then Privacy & Security, then Website Advertising Preferences, and uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.
If all else fails and your mobile phone continues to perform poorly or indicate compromise risk, backup your contacts, important files and photos then perform a complete factory reset. A factory reset will wipe all files and data from the phone. As such, a factory reset must be treated as a last resort. A complete factory reset is essentially a nuclear option and will wipe out everything on your mobile phone.
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