Knowing and Preventing Smartphone Hacking Risks, Part 1

While certain types of damage to your smartphone will be limited to physical defects that impact performance, there are other risks that don’t threaten these areas, but rather your access and personal information. Such threats can generally be summarized into a broad category: Hacking.

At FixIT Mobile, while our primary phone repair services include physical damage areas like screen repairs, water damage repairs, charging issues or related concerns, we’re also happy to help with areas like hacking and fraud prevention and mobile security. Whether we’re talking about simple phone security themes and basics or more advanced concepts for those who want heavy layers of protection here, we’ll offer tips and expertise to keep your device and information secure. This two-part blog series will dig into everything you should know about phone security, including the risks to watch out for any some basic and advanced hacking prevention techniques.

Potential Impact to All Users

It’s important for all modern smartphone users to be both aware of and realistic about the risks of phone security. Gone are the days where mobile phones couldn’t even come close to the average PC in terms of technology and personal data usage – phones are miniature computers now, and are prone to the same kinds of risks.

Now, this isn’t to say you’re simply wandering around in the Wild West without any protection. iPhones and various Android models come with modern security features to prevent hacking, features that are generally effective for the majority of people. However, these features do often require at least some user assistance, and there are many ways you can compromise your phone’s defenses, often unintentionally.

Types of Security Risks

There are several kinds of potential hacking attempts that may be made on smartphones, including each of the following:

• Malware: When a user is fooled into downloading malware onto a device that’s disguised as some other program, but instead is malicious.

• Buffer overflows: When certain programs try to store more data in a buffer than they are designed for, they overwrite adjacent memory due to a programming error. However, this same error can lead to a type of security attack seen on both PCs and phones.

• Synchronization: When synching your phone and your PC, certain kinds of malware may jump to or from the mobile device.

• Denial of service: This is a form of attack that makes resources unavailable to the user.

• Phishing: Known as “SMiShing” in the mobile world, this is a format that uses text messages to lead you into giving away personal information, either directly or by downloading malicious software.

For more on the kinds of security risks potentially facing smartphone users, or to learn about any of our computer repair, tablet repair or other device repair services, speak to the staff at FixIT Mobile today.