Tips for Protecting Your Cellphone Data from Hackers

sarikazdubey

7 years ago

Tips for Protecting Your Cellphone Data from Hackers

It is quite understandable that you’ve probably stored a lot of important data on your cell phone. From credit cards information to confidential emails to business reports, you’ve kept copious amounts of private data on your mobile device that you would neither want to make public nor want to get destroyed.

Some of us would not even bother taking any necessary precautions to keep our cell phones protected, believing that our personal data is safe and secure on our devices. However, that’s not the case.

With the outburst of cyber attacks in recent times, we should not risk our private data getting into the hands of a wrongdoer and should take online privacy seriously. If there are no existing data security measures in place then we are putting our online data at a huge risk. Our slight carelessness can pave the way for the hackers to snoop into our devices and discreetly steal all our private data.

This will lead to a number of cyber attacks including data breach, identity theft, and data leak. The same hackers can then use our personal information against us by asking for ransom in return.

Once our personal data is leaked, there is nothing much we can do about it except for doing what the hackers want us to do. Before you face such ordeal, you must certainly pay attention towards keeping your cell phone data protected from the hackers.

Following are some of the tips that you might want to learn in order to keep your personal data safe and secure from the hackers:

Use a VPN

A VPN is regarded as one of the best online security tools because it offers online anonymity and complete internet freedom. Normally, they’re available for free but some also offer paid versions. Acting like a secure tunnel, a best free VPN encrypts all the data that passes through your cell phone and internet connection.

Moreover, it hides your IP address from everyone – including your internet service provider and makes you appear anonymous on the internet. With a VPN service enabled on your cell phone, your online data remains protected from the prying eyes. This especially is helpful when you’re connected to a public Wi-Fi connection.

By using a VPN server, you can freely avail the services of a public Wi-Fi connection because a VPN comes with a strong encryption power that does not allow anyone to intercept your online data and keeps it protected from the hackers.

Update Your Apps

All the apps installed in your phone – be it a social media app or a game app – must be updated on a regular basis. What happens is, when a hacker finds a security hole in one of your apps, they can easily exploit it to access your personal data stored on your phone.

You can never find out what kind of information is being collected about you and where it is being distributed. To save yourself from this mess, always make it a point to keep your apps updated so all the issues and bugs get fixed with time.

It would be better to get rid of apps that you rarely use or don’t use at all. Always install apps from reliable sources like Google playstore and Apple iTunes to make sure they’re legitimate.

Lock Your Phone

Not locking up your phone is like keeping a door open for the hackers. If you don’t have the habit of locking up your phone then you might be in trouble. An unlocked phone gives a good opportunity to the hacker to snoop on your device and then get hands on your private data.

You can save yourself from a whole lot of trouble either by creating a strong password or activating a lock screen pattern. If your phone has the option of setting up a password to lock your phone, then use a long password because it is stronger than the short one. Furthermore, all the apps installed on your phone must also be password-protected.

No Public Wi-Fi

We would always recommend you to steer clear of public Wi-Fi connections because they’re more vulnerable to cyberattacks and are also the unsafe form of internet connections. As soon as you get your cell phone connected to a public Wi-Fi connection, your online activity becomes openly available to everyone.

This makes easier for the hacker to intercept and capture your personal data. Therefore, you should, by all means, stay away from them. However, if your profession requires you to frequently travel to different places and to make use of public Wi-Fi hotspots for that matter, then we would advise you to use a VPN to protect your online data from the hackers.

Once you have a VPN enabled on your device, you can securely connect to the public Wi-Fi connection and keep your data secure from the prying eyes.

Install Anti-Virus App

Last but not the least, get an anti-virus app installed on your phone to safeguard it from the hackers. Some of the anti-virus apps do help in keeping the hackers at bay. If they’re timely updated, they can detect which particular app or folder contains a hazardous file or malware. Once you find the exact location of the virus, you can simply remove the file, or the app, or even reset your phone in the worst situation.