The Role Cybersecurity Plays in Your Mobile Device

Maintaining Your Mobile Device’s State of Cybersecurity

When the age of computers gave rise to the Internet and resulted in virtually every household getting digitally connected, it gave rise to a new breed of cybercriminal. Bad actors were presented with an entire new playing field in which they could invent devious methods of accessing the personal information of all kinds of people now forced to maintain online profiles as parts of their livelihoods. Cybersecurity institutions have done a great deal over the years to block off the most intrusive and financially destructive crimes a cybercriminal can inflict, largely resulting in their inability to outright take personal information and money by force. Therefore, cybercriminals must rely on tricking their victims into voluntarily disclosing their information.

When the digital era largely transitioned from desktop computers to mobile devices for many users, cybercriminals adjusted their tactics to make it all the more likely that victims would unwittingly share their information through their own cell phones. The most common method of achieving this is to send emails that come across as anything but shady or illegitimate, using social engineering tactics to convince users that they must share their login data or actual bank information in order to resolve a supposedly urgent problem. These are categorized as phishing scams, and not every mobile device user will have trained themselves to be skeptical of every potential phishing message regardless of how much they look like they come from reputable institutions.

Of course, thanks to advances in technology, cybercriminals are always coming up with ways to sneak actual malware onto users’ systems that might take no more than the user clicking on the wrong button. Especially damaging examples of this attack the very data on the phone itself, in some cases even going so far as to lock off files on the system itself and forcing users to pay demanded ransoms — and the ransomware might not go away even after the payment is made.

Mobile devices are also popular targets for digital scammers because they tend to be brought over in range of all kinds of free Wi-Fi hotspots, which the user might be tempted to connect to. The free Wi-Fi offered at grocery stores is unexpectedly risky because it tends to lack encryption, which means cybercriminals in the area could feasibly monitor cell phone activity. To minimize this risk, cell phone users can install a Virtual Private Network to keep their active profiles hidden when using public Wi-Fi services.

Other worthwhile measures cell phone users can take to protect their devices from getting invaded include installing antivirus software and changing to stronger passwords that use longer strings with more unusual text characters in them. Applying every update released for said software and having a different password for each app on the device is considered standard practice, though today’s technology allows for additional layers of security that are even tougher for cybercriminals to crack. Specifically, if the phone itself supports it, users can use their own fingerprints or faces as a form of password.