Published on March 15th, 2023
Your smartphone is the most important asset for you now-a-days and you need to protect it against any odds.
You are so dependent on your phone in your daily life that you can’t even imagine your life without it. What if something goes wrong with it like loss of your phone or theft. Even worse, if your smartphone after being stolen or lost, gets hacked by cybercriminals to be misused.
Today, we use our phones for both personal and professional work. A report explains that more than 50% people in Spain use their smartphone for both personal and work-related activities.
The same statistics remain with multiple other countries where people use mobile phones in abundance. This fact is quite evident in all developing nations with growing electronic and telecom penetration.
With the advent of all your commercial activities via your mobile phone; be it mail, banking, financial, eCommerce, trading, online shopping, etc.; the smartphones today are one of the top preferences for hackers.
Since hacking these smartphones gives the hackers the advantage of access to both personal and professional data of the victims. So, the hacking efforts of cyber hackers in these cases are doubly rewarded with the access to personal and work data.
You need to protect your smartphone from getting hacked. So, here we are advising you with 7 tips for protecting your valuable smartphone and data from getting hacked and keep both your personal and work life safe from cyber cons.
1. Protect Your Smartphone With An Essential Security Software
Since you have such important stuff and data in your phone, it is always recommended to install a standard and reputed security software in your mobile phone.
You can always plan a budget for this security software based on the value of the data you have in your phone.
There are multiple security software apps available for the users worldwide based on their requirements.
Irrespective of you being an Android owner or iOS owner, these mobile security apps can keep your phone as well as your data safe and secure from any harm.
2. Learn To Lock Your Phone Or Erase Data Remotely In Case Of Loss Or Theft
Consider a scenario where your phone is either lost or stolen, and you cannot do anything about it. So, what are the preventive measures you can take now to safeguard yourself? You need to erase all the data your phone has or lock your phone permanently so that no one can access your data.
Since erasing your data will be the last option you have, but if you have to erase it anyways, please keep in mind to maintain regular backups on the cloud so that your data will be available for you to recover and restore in future.
In this case, the hackers won’t be able to access your personal data, or your company’s, sensitive information which will keep you away from any trouble and stress.
3. Try To Add Extra Protection With Your Face, Finger, Pattern, Or Passcode
For this basic exercise, you need to first set up all the additional locking capabilities available on your smartphone like a face ID lock, fingerprint lock, a pattern lock, or a passcode for your phone to unlock.
These basic security measures are your first line of defense against any unwanted access to your phone by anyone and an elementary method of protecting your smartphone as well.
These will be helpful specially in the event of loss or theft. You may add additional apps for locking up your smartphone or mobile apps.
Also, it’s always advisable to secure your accounts on your phone with unique passwords and two-factor authentication wherever applicable, which doubles your line of defense.
You May Also Like: 5 Essential Tips for Securing Your Mobile Apps in 2023
4. Be Loyal To Your Official App Store For Your Apps
Both apple and android operating systems have their official iStore and play store respectively to serve their users with authentic and verified mobile apps for usage.
They remove and filter out all potentially dangerous and malicious apps from getting into their stores. They keep on doing regular and mandatory checks for these malicious apps and their dangerous developers.
However, Malicious apps and counterfeits can still find their way into these stores. So, you need to be cautious while installing any new app by verifying all the basic and mandatory fact checks and reviews.
These counterfeit apps can run in the background and steal all your personal data like passwords, financial details, and all the valuable data which you keep on your phone.
5. Back Up Your Data Regularly On Your Phone
Regular data back-up on your smartphones are a good practice and recommended due to following reasons:
Firstly, it ensures that your data stays with you in case your phone is lost or stolen and allows you to remotely erase your data on your lost or stolen phone and still have a secure back-up of your data stored in the cloud, which you can further restore.
Secondly, this also makes the process of transferring your data to a new smartphone easy where you can easily recover the backed-up data from your old stolen or lost phone to your new phone.
But you need to understand the process and steps of restoring your backed up data which might be different based on your phone’s model, operating system, etc.
6. Remove All Old Apps And Update Your Apps Regularly
It’s quite common that we all have additional apps in our smartphones which are of no use to us. We might have downloaded them at one point of time for use, but we might have not used them for months. For example, food apps, shopping apps or even gaming apps on our devices.
We almost forget that they exist in our phones. You need to stop this by reviewing your phone against all these unnecessary apps and see which ones you need and which ones you need to uninstall.
It’s a good practice to delete such apps along with your data on them. 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.
Also, for the apps which you keep on your phone, try updating them regularly and turn on auto-updates if that is an option. Updates not only introduce new features to apps, but they also often address security issues too.
7. Don’t Use Public Wi-Fi Networks
You should always refrain from using public Wi-Fi systems as they are vulnerable and can lead to unwanted access by hackers to your phone via these networks.
It is always recommended to use a standard VPN (virtual private network) which masks your connection from hackers allowing you to connect privately when you are on unsecured public networks at public places.
With a VPN connection your sensitive data, documents, and activities are protected from snooping by hackers to keep you safe and secure with your personal and professional data.
So, follow these top seven tips to protect your smartphone from getting hacked. Hope you will use them from now onwards.
