How to find out if your phone is hacked

I have had this question come up quite a lot from people asking “hey, how would I know if my phone is hacked, it has been doing some weird things”.

So here is a list of items you should check to assess if your mobile phone might be compromised.

What might show my phone got hacked ?

Check Your Data Usage

Most mobile devices will let you check how much data each app has used up. For apps related to social media it would make sense for them to use up a lot of data. But if you have an app, you barely use, and you can see there is quite a lot of data usage on it. That might indicate that it has been running and sending/receiving data. Compromised apps, may tend to use more data since the attacker may be trying to send data over your phone to their own systems. A good way to measure this is to check your app data usage every month. So, you get to know what the average data usage if for each app you use.

Pop ups or Ads

This one is an obvious one, if you see random ads popping up out of no where. Or random windows pop up on your screen. There is a good chance your phone has malware, and/or an app was installed and could have full access to your mobile device. You should go through ALL your apps to see what you have running on your mobile device. If there is anything that you see which should not be running or installed. Remove the app and check to be sure it was removed with the app no longer showing up as running/installed.

Your Phone gets hot all the time

A phone gets very hot to touch when it’s running an app that takes up a lot of processing power. And, that makes your phone start to heat up. If this is happening to a point where your phone is always super hot to touch. Then chances are a malicious app is running all the time causing your phone to heat up. This is a good chance to view all apps running and see which one has been running the most. It could be an indicator that it is a malicious app and should be removed.

How did I get hacked ?

Hardening Mobile Phone Devices – iOS/Android

Mobile Hardening

A question I often get asked by a lot of mobile users is regarding how they can secure “harden” their mobile devices. What can they do to add some layers of protection to secure their mobile devices?

There aren’t a whole lot of software tools that are out there which actually harden mobile devices. And, it’s a bit unfortunate that mobile security has a lower priority these days.

Kaspersky Threats 2015

Courtesy of (https://www.kaspersky.com)

For most Android and iOS devices there are a few steps and actions that you can take in order to harden your mobile device.

The following steps should give you some basic hardening techniques for personal use.
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Samsung Note 7 Recall – Batteries Blowing up?

Samsung Note 7 Mobile Devices

Samsung recently released a new phone to their existing line of phones.

They released their new device the Note 7, which made some amazing sales in the first week of its release.
The demand was so high, they they ended up selling out all of their preorders.

However, it seems that Samsung now has come head to head with a new global issue.

An announcement was made recently which revealed that the Samsung Note 7 devices can melt, catch on fire and even explode when being charged.
The issue seems to reside from using a battery supplier than possibly did not make high quality batteries.

The models sold in China had a battery made from another supplier, which might be why none of these issues have been heard of in China so far.
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