When your phone starts acting out of the ordinary, or apps operate on their own accord, it’s a good sign that something is seriously wrong with your device. This article goes over how to know if your phone is hacked, identifying the vulnerability, and the best ways to protect your mobile device.
It’s one thing to have your device behave poorly and know you’ve been hacked. It’s another (potentially far worse) thing to be hacked and have no clue that it happened. That gives the hacker plenty of time to linger around your device undetected.
That begs some very important questions: How do you know if your phone is hacked? Will you be able to stop or prevent an attack on your phone? How can you tell if your device is secure in the future? Here’s everything you need to know.
What is phone hacking?
Phone hacking is any practice of exploiting access to a mobile device or its communications without authorization. This can involve physical theft of the device or remote interference, ranging from targeted manual attacks to automated malware obtained by the user. Phone hacking can happen to any mobile device on the market, including Androids and iPhones. Since anyone can fall victim to phone hacking, it’s important to be able to spot the phone hacked signs right away.
How to know if your phone is hacked
If you’re experiencing any combination of these five common signs, your phone has likely been affected by some kind of an attack. Here’s how to know if your phone is hacked
- Bad carrier network performance
Didn’t receive a call even though you know you’ve been contacted? The cause may not be your carrier’s signal.
When a hacker takes control of your phone, they may disable certain basic communications functions for you. You’ll experience a slow network despite visual indications for a strong signal. You may even find yourself not receiving calls, texts, and other messages.
Often this occurs when a hacker copies your SIM and begins using it from another phone, diverting the SMS messages and calls you would receive to their device. - Fast-draining battery (and data)
Any time you’re burning through resources faster than usual is a cause for concern.
When someone hacks your phone, you may be able to find evidence of the breach in your battery life and data usage. If you find your phone suddenly unable to maintain power for its normal length of time, this may be a sign that you were hacked. Since an active hacker or malware uses your device, their presence— opening and closing apps, background processing, remote connections, etc.—can cause a sudden and significant drain on your battery life.
Similarly, check your data usage through your phone provider. If you are using more data than usual, without any change to your normal internet activity, then that’s another good way to know if your phone is hacked. - Mysterious outbound messages & calls
Check your text and call history. If your phone is making one-off communications to numbers you don’t know, that’s a strong sign that someone has hacked your phone.
A similar thing to look for is apps that you know you didn’t download. Simply, if it seems like a stranger borrowed your device while you weren’t looking, then there’s a very good chance that someone has exploited your device. - Inappropriate mobile pop-ups
One clear way to know your phone is hacked or affected by malware is the appearance of X-rated pop-ups. This one might be the most obvious on our list. If you’re seeing pop-ups with inappropriate content, someone has likely attacked your device.
- Third-party account takeover
Another phone hacked sign comes from unusual account activity on the apps that you access through your phone. Most commonly, people discover evidence of this in their social media activity. If your social media accounts show that you’ve Liked or shared things that you know you didn’t, then someone may be accessing your accounts through a hacked phone.
The first thing to do in this case is to access your social media accounts from a desktop device and immediately change all your account passwords. This will eject the hacker from their session, giving you more time to deal with the hacked device.
How to stop your phone from being hacked
Now that you can know if your phone is being hacked, you can take productive steps to remedy the situation and take back control.
First, you must eliminate any malware or virus that’s infected your device. Malicious apps found in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store show that neither phone is immune to hacking. And whether you download a bad app, click a bad text link, or make a bad connection, malware has plenty of entry points that rely on poor user judgment.
How to get rid of a virus on your phone
- Install an antivirus app. Antivirus isn’t just for computers. Mobile antivirus apps like VIPRE Android Security scan and remove known Android malware and viruses from your phone. Plus, extra browser and app security settings decrease the chances of data loss and unwanted background activity.
- Unfortunately, iOS security restrictions prevent one-touch antivirus apps from even being a possibility. But there are still a few ways to close security holes and stop your phone from being hacked.
- Update your operating system and apps. This common bit of digital hygiene advice is an important base in securing any system. Not only do updates contain new features, they’re safety enhancements and vulnerability patches meant to protect your phone from being hacked.
- Remove untrustworthy apps. If the phone hacked signs you’re experiencing are new, consider whether a new photo app or game you’ve downloaded might be the culprit. But if the problem has been ongoing, then it may be time to review all your apps: delete the ones that have gone unopened for months, and read the reviews of the rest.
- Restore an older backup. It’s not ideal, but it’s a surefire way to reclaim an uncorrupted copy of your phone data. Depending on the age of your backup data loss is inevitable, but minimal compared to complete erasure.
- Reset to factory settings. If you’re most concerned with recovering the functionality of your device despite data loss then a factory reset will usually remove viruses from your phone. But that is not always 100% the case.
Due to the variety and ever-evolving nature of malware, it’s impossible to say for sure that a factory reset will save your phone from a virus infection. If you have an infected backup, if malware is on your phone’s recovery partition, or you have some sort of rootkit malware, a virus will survive a factory reset.
Once you’ve removed any potential malware from your device, you can concentrate on your app accounts. Think about the digital accounts you usually access from your phone and consider changing your passwords to unauthenticate the sessions of any other device. That way, anyone else logged into your account needs to log in with the updated password.
The most commonly hacked digital accounts are usually:
- Social media
- Online banking
- Shopping services
- Email (work and personal)
- Apple ID or Google account
- Phone passcode
- Mobile games
Don’t have access to the physical device? If you’re confident it will not return, you’ll want to perform a remote wipe to protect your apps and phone from being hacked.
How to protect your phone from getting hacked in the future
From iCloud account breaches to Wi-Fi attacks, phone hacking security has grown increasingly important over the last decade. The best way to stop someone from hacking your phone is to remain vigilant and proactive with your security. Follow these security best practices to lower your hacking risks and protect your phone from being hacked.
Install apps with care. You already know not to download sketchy and unreputable apps; that goes for system themes and mods too. Even if you only download apps from official stores, read the reviews and do a quick Google search before downloading an app to your phone. If you’re not confident in the safety of an app, do not install it.
Don’t jailbreak your phone. This goes hand-in-hand with ‘installing apps with care.’ While jailbreaking your iPhone may allow you to download apps from unofficial marketplaces, you open yourself to major risk. Not only will you miss security patches in system updates, but jailbreaking your phone may make factory resets and malware attacks brick your phone.
Back up your data to the cloud. The best way to salvage your phone’s data when disaster strikes is to restore it from a recent backup. Whether ransomware has taken control of your phone or it’s been physically lost, recovering a recent backup is the best way to ensure minimal loss to messages, photos, and saved media. Both Android and Apple phones include data backup services natively through their devices. Encrypted backup services like SugarSync and Livedrive also provide selective data backups with other security features. Be sure to set a redundant backup schedule that occurs daily or weekly. You never know when you’ll need it, and you won’t want it to be outdated.
Lock your phone with a passcode or biometric. Always use a passcode lock, complex password, or biometric to secure your device. If a person can physically access your phone, this lock offers a barrier between them and the breach of your data. Be sure not to use easily guessable dates, like birthdays, graduation dates, or lazy defaults for any passcode. Or do one better with a biometric and use a fingerprint or facial scan to secure your device to your physical identifiers.
Always enable two-factor authentication (2FA). This offers a secondary method of verification following a successful first attempt to access an account. 2FA uses another private account or something you physically have unrelated to the initial login point. This private account might come through an authentication app, an SMS/phone call code, or email. Physical USB keys are also a great authentication choice when available. Most popular online services and sites offer 2FA to prevent account hacking, so always activate it for greater protection whenever you can.
Set up a remote wipe. If all is lost and your physical device cannot be recovered, the best way to protect your phone data from hacking is to make it self-destruct. Both Android and Apple phones offer this security feature natively, but not by default. Continue to the iPhone remote wipe instructions and the Android remote wipe instructions to configure your phones.
Secure Wi-Fi connections with a VPN. It’s never a good idea to use public Wi-Fi without a virtual private network (VPN). That’s because anyone else on the network can intercept the unencrypted traffic that travels through the connection like banking data, passwords, communications, and activity. Apps like IPVanish VPN encrypt and conceal your data so unwanted viewers can’t intercept it. With a VPN on your device, you can secure your phone against hackers on the same network while protecting your privacy from advertisers and websites online.
