Cyber-Attacks: Smartphones

These days your computer is not always that bulky black thing that sits under your desk, providing power to another bulky monitor above. Today, your computer is that small, 5” phone in your pocket you use to make calls. These are smartphones.

Every part of the World Wide Web has become available to smartphones with recent innovations. You can write emails, upload content and visit virtually every site on the web. What you don’t hear about is that another aspect of the web is infecting phones. Smartphones have become victims to cyber-attacks, and more often than you might think.

Many consumers have lived under the glorious assumption that because they are using a phone to access sites, that the sites can affect them. This may have been true for a few months, but Malware makers have been working on new forms of cyber-attacks. Using a combination of malware and imitation apps, they have worked their way into millions of phones around the world, with China and India suffering the most. These viruses do anything from mess your phone’s functionality to steal money from you to use your device to conduct illegal activity—making you look like the perpetrator and keeping them safe behind a cloak of invisibility.

Having a smartphone does not guarantee that you are free from malware and viruses. The people that make them for PCs are intelligent and clever. They figure something out and then sell the programing to thieves.

There is not much we can do to keep these people from trying to hack our phones. But we can do things to protect them. For example, do not download something from a site just because it is there. One identified threat was a site purporting to be Adobe’s Reader App on websites. People saw it was for “Adobe,” trusted it and then downloaded it. The resulting virus hurt them much more than helped.

Also consider asking your phone provider about other ways to protect your phone from intruders. Protect yourself from the viruses that would come to harm you.