Most people and certainly the large majority of younger people use their phones for everything including banking, online purchases and entertainment.  As a result of all of the personal information found on your phone, cellphones are a major target of hackers seeking to steal text messages, emails, contacts, photos, passwords and a wide variety of other information that the scammers can use to make you a victim of identity theft or a scam.

So what should you do to protect your cellphone?

Recently, Senator Angus King who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee disclosed a tip he learned from security experts that he uses to help keep his phone secure and it is pretty basic and easy to do, namely turn your phone off every now and then.  While one way that hackers are able to access your phone is through luring you into clicking on infected links in text messages and emails, sophisticated hackers will use zero-click exploits which don’t require you to do anything to enable the infection of your phone.  These hackers use in-memory payloads that don’t require you to click on anything to enable the malware to be downloaded.  Fortunately, such hacks don’t survive a rebooting of your device so while many people never turn off their phone, it is recommended that you turn off and restart your phone at least once a week as a security measure.

TIPS

The National Security Agency (NSA) has issued a list of best practices for security on your mobile device that includes many of the suggestions I have made to you over the years such as avoiding public Wi-Fi, installing security updates as soon as they become available, not clicking on unconfirmed links in text messages and not using public USB charging stations.  Click on this link for the full list. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21018353-nsa-mobile-device-best-practices

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