As data breaches, phishing, and ransomware attacks continue to rise, it is extremely important to learn how to protect your mobile device from prying eyes. Needless to say, many criminals are just waiting for a perfect moment to break into your gadgets, all because they contain tons of confidential data that could be sold to third parties or used for other nefarious purposes.
This raises an extremely important question – how can you hack-proof your mobile device? Well, we have the answer!
Here are a few simple ways to protect your mobile against hacking attacks.
1. Keep your software updated
This is one of the most important safety precautions you should take to maintain the safety of your smartphone. Upgrading your operating system periodically is essential to make sure that it is in line with the recent fixes of known vulnerabilities.
As more vulnerabilities are discovered, updates are rolled out to fix the security holes before hackers can exploit them.
You can set your phone to update automatically to ensure that the latest updates are installed on your device. Or alternatively, you can search for the available updates manually as well.
Here is how to update your OS:
Android:
Settings > About Phone > System Updates
iOS:
Settings > General> Software Update
2. Use a VPN
Using a VPN is highly recommended, especially when you want to login to your bank account, shop online, and post photos on your social media wall. If you do these things while using public Wi-Fi, wait no longer, and get a VPN.
Your information travels through the internet by bouncing between various servers located across the world. All this provides various opportunities to hackers to steal your information. Your connection to a public Wi-Fi is not secure either and can easily be intercepted. This is why it is recommended to avoid using open connections unless you are using reliable security tools to protect your data.
To protect your sensitive info and smartphone from hackers, it is necessary to use a VPN which establishes a virtual private connection. It reroutes your traffic through an encrypted tunnel, making anything you do online invisible to snoopers. With a VPN you can also securely connect to public WiFi networks. In most countries, using a VPN is completely legal but there are a few exceptions of which you should know about in order to avoid any potential trouble.
3. Know what you install
If you often download apps without knowing much about them, you could be putting your smartphone (and all the sensitive information on it) at great risk. The thing is that by installing an app, you grant them access to your files, camera, microphone, contact list, and so on.
While the legitimate app developers do not misuse these permissions, there are various apps that are specifically designed to track your confidential data and spy on your activities. This is especially true for Android users, as Google is comparatively lenient when it comes to allowing the developers to publish their apps on the App Store.
Additionally, Android also allows you installing apps from various third-party sources that don’t usually meet the quality standards. Therefore, it is highly recommended to avoid installing apps from unknown websites.
4. Use a password manager
It is essential to keep your phone password-protected to keep your personal data safe from snoopers and hackers. So make sure your passwords are strong, long, complex, and difficult to breach.
If you are like most of the people, you have tons of passwords meant for different accounts, your laptop, smartphones and other gadgets you own. Remembering all of them can be a difficult task, so what you may want to do is to get a reliable password manager that will create strong passwords for you and will keep them securely locked under the master password.
The master password is the only thing you will need to remember – the password manager will take care of the rest.
5. Lock individual apps
A strong passcode can prevent your phone from unauthorized access, but what if a stranger snatched the phone out of your hands while you were using it? Or asked you to borrow it to make a call and never returned?
This is why you should use an app to lock potentially sensitive apps, to keep them secure even if an attacker manages to go past the lock screen. There are various apps available for this purpose like AVG antivirus and others.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you got some best guidance and tips that will surely help you to save your data being stolen from your device. Use these tips on the daily life it won’t ket you make the victim whose data has stolen. I liked this post then share it with your friends and family to let them know about these helpful tips to save their phones because data is more important than any other thing on our smartphone.