Girlfriends, friends, relatives, parents, police forces: everyone has the ability to spy on your smartphone and steal personal data. Here’s how to defend yourself
How secure is your personal data on your smartphone? Very, very little. Cell phones are the devices we use the most during the day, and they contain all of our information, from our bank account numbers and passwords to access online services to our home address and our friends’ phone numbers.
That’s why smartphones have become increasingly targeted by fraudsters and hackers, who are hoping for a distraction from the user to infect the phone. However, smartphones are also important for law enforcement investigations: being able to hack into the device and get hold of the data inside allows you to discover all the secrets that a suspect is hiding. Protecting your personal data from these dangers is anything but simple. In fact, spying on a smartphone and taking control of it remotely is possible using programs that are available online and can be purchased for a few hundred euros. These practices are illegal, but more and more people are implementing them.
How people can spy on my smartphone
According to Kevin Mitnick, American hacker and author of the book “Art of Invisibility”, there are two tactics that can be used to spy on a person’s smartphone: steal the device and install an application that spies on everything the user does, or ask for help from a company that exploits a flaw in the mobile operating system to take remote control of the smartphone. The second method is the most effective, but also the most expensive (some companies require up to $1.5 million). The first tactic is much cheaper (the program to install costs a little more than a hundred euros), but to insert the application into the smartphone you need to have physical access to the device and know the unlocking PIN.
How to protect your smartphone from spies
If our smartphone is hacked we will hardly be able to figure it out. Le applicazioni-spia sono molto brave a mimetizzarsi all’interno della memoria dello smartphone e agiscono nell’ombra. Ma se abbiamo il timore di essere spiati si può proteggere il proprio smartphone usando tre semplici trucchi:
- Installare l’ultima versione del sistema operativo. Aggiornare lo smartphone all’ultima versione del sistema operativo mobile assicura la massima protezione contro qualsiasi tipo di malware e di app-spia utilizzata dagli hacker. Se vi arriva la notifica con l’update da installare, fatelo immediatamente.
- Utilizzare un PIN complesso. Per installare il programma che spia tutti i nostri movimenti è necessario che i nostri amici o parenti abbiano l’accesso fisico al dispositivo e che conoscano il PIN per lo sblocco. Se impostiamo una password complessa composta da 5-6 numeri, per i nostri amici sarà più difficile riuscire ad accedere al dispositivo.
- Reset alle impostazioni di fabbrica. Se si è convinti di essere spiati, la soluzione più efficace per eliminare l’applicazione o il malware è effettuare il reset e riportare il dispositivo alle impostazioni di fabbrica. È possibile farlo su qualsiasi tipo di smartphone, sia Android sia iOS.