Mobile Phone Hacking: Can You Truly Avoid It?

Despite the rapid growth of the Smartphone market, and the increasing importance of these devices in our personal and business lives, most users, remain unaware of the potential for mobile phone hacking. It is prevalent and far too easy.

There are two primary forms of mobile phone hacking:

• Voice hacking, where someone is able to eavesdrop on your voice calls or remotely access your voicemail messages.
• Data hacking, where the data within your mobile phone, including texts, email, contact information and more can be viewed, stolen and recorded.

Hacking can take many forms. However, if you have the TrustChip by KoolSpan embedded in your Smartphone, hackers can’t alter or access your information because it is tamper-proof.

Without the TrustChip, chips within the phone can be altered, pass-codes can be deciphered and remote access gained. A “Bluetooth” hack allows someone nearby to access the data in your phone – or control its functions.  Inexpensive equipment that can eavesdrop on mobile-to mobile conversations is readily available. Hackers have the means of misdirecting your mobile signal to a false cell station. Malware within apps can access information or re-direct activities. There is no such thing as Smartphone or Android security.

Consider all the calls you make, all the voice-mails you leave, all the messages you receive. You use your phone for work and personal pursuits. Most of today’s Smartphones have as much storage and processing power as PCs from only a few years ago. That is a lot of data!

Fortunately, users can take preventative measures.

• Using a strong PIN to protect access to the phone and your voice messages is the simplest.
• Avoid public Wi-Fi or unknown hot-spots. If you do use these, make sure not to access your private banking information, use your credit card or expose other sensitive information.
• Secure your own Wi-Fi router.
• Do not store sensitive information on the device. Or, if you do, do not store these within insecure apps, such as the very common “Notes” app.
• It’s probably for the best that you do not store your various PINs and passwords on the device.
• If you are uncertain about an area, consider turning off the mobile phone’s Bluetooth setting. Bluetooth allows mobile phone hackers to gain access to your phone.
• Regularly delete your browsing history.
• If your mobile phone offers it, set-up the remote wipe feature in case the device is lost or stolen. Not all Smartphones offer this feature, unfortunately.
• Update your phone’s settings so that it does not store your password or other data for the sites that you regularly visit.

There are strong, robust solutions like the TrustChip available to individual users, businesses, corporate enterprises, government and the military. But there are also measures that you can take as well on your own. Take the time to protect yourself.

Call 240-880-4400 or contact KoolSpan to learn more about TrustChip.