Your mobile phone holds some of your most sensitive personal information. Things like your passwords and account numbers, emails, text messages, photos, and videos. If your phone ends up in the wrong hands, someone could steal your identity, buy stuff with your money, or hack into your email or social media accounts. Here’s how to protect your phone.
Protect your smartphone from being hacked
Below are some way to protect smartphone from hackers
1. Add extra protection with your face, finger, pattern, or PIN.
First up, the basics. Locking your phone with facial ID, a fingerprint, pattern or a pin is your most basic form of protection, particularly in the event of loss or theft. (Your options will vary depending on the device, operating system, and manufacturer.) Take it a step further for even more protection. Secure the accounts on your phone with strong passwords
2. Use a VPN.
Just don’t go on Wi-Fi networks without protection. A VPN ( Virtual Private Network) masks your connection from hackers allowing you to connect privately when you are on unsecure public networks at airports, cafes, hotels, and the like. With a VPN connection, you’ll know that your sensitive data, documents, and activities you do are protected from snooping, which is definitely a great feeling given the amount of personal and professional business we manage with our smartphones. Please be careful about which VPN to use.
3. Stick to the official app stores for your apps.
Both Google Play and Apple’s App Store have measures in place to help prevent potentially dangerous apps from making it into their stores. Malicious apps are often found outside of the app stores, which can run in the background and compromise your personal data like passwords, credit card numbers, and more—practically everything that you keep on your phone. Further, when you are in the app stores, look closely at the descriptions and reviews for apps before you download them. Malicious apps and counterfeits can still find their way into stores, and here are a few ways you can keep those bad apps from getting onto your phone.
4. Learn to clear Cookies
Do you know your browser keeps info about you? Cookies are small pieces of text sent to your browser by a website you visit. They help that website remember information about your visit, which can both make it easier to visit the site again and make the site more useful to you.
Cookies can store a wide range of information, including personally identifiable information (such as your name, home address, email address, or telephone number) this happens when you provide them. Thus when logging or signing up for an account. With all the numerous beneibof cookies, it still possible a great threat to security. Why, Since cookies are stored in the memory as text files, it posses some serious security risks. Any intruder can easily open these files and view the information. And also, not all the sites that collect information from cookies are legitimate. Some of them can be malicious that uses cookies for the purpose of hacking. Therefore it’s important to clear all cookies off your phone.
5. Get rid of old apps—and update the ones you keep.
We all download apps, use them for sometime, and forget they are on our phone. Take a few moments to scroll through the list of apps on your screen and see which ones you’re truly done with and delete them along with their data. Some apps have an account associated with them that may store data off your phone as well. Take the extra step and delete those accounts so any off-phone data is deleted.
This is because every extra app is another app that needs updating or that may have a security issue associated with it. In a time of data breaches and vulnerabilities, deleting old apps is a smart move. As for the ones you keep, update them regularly . Updates does not only imports new features to apps, but they also often address security issues too.
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