Protecting Your Device from Malicious Hackers

Our mobile devices such as our smartphones are pretty much extensions of ourselves in every sense these days. If you use payment apps such as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Alipay, WeChat Pay, etc, or even the likes of PayPal or your primary bank’s mobile banking app, basically your device is an access point for one of the most delicate areas of our lives, your finances! While your finances are indeed a major consideration point for the security required around the use of your mobile device, it goes beyond that with the threats that malicious hackers come with.

Major telecommunications company, Pop Telecom, which provides mobile internet services amongst others (such as fibre) has weighed in with their expertise on how users can go about protecting their devices from the nefarious fingers of malicious hackers. Some very useful tips are shared, but what these bring into focus is that your device is actually only as safe as the vigilance with which you use it.

If you apply what are essentially some safety precautions which come from a place of nothing more than some common sense, like ensuring your device is always locked when you’re not using it, setting up your apps to update automatically, not opening unfamiliar links and using open Wi-Fi network connections with caution, then there’s not much malicious hackers can do to gain unauthorised access to your device and sensitive data.

Hacking a phone takes nothing like the form of those Hollywood hacker-type scenes where someone sits in a dark room, frantically typing away at a screen in some space-age green text, trying to gain access to your device remotely. Rather, it takes the form of something like malicious code embedded in apps that are installed from a source you’re not 100% sure can be trusted, vulnerabilities exploited in apps which you haven’t updated, etc.

Ken
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