Is Your Smartphone Safe Enough?

Smartphones are intensely powerful these days, and they are really only getting more powerful. Every year and a half or so computing power doubles, and this affects smartphones as well. The problem behind all this power is that it’s a two way street. Increased power means increased risk, often enough. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to make sure your phone and all of the data on it is safe enough.

Viruses for Smartphones?

One of the initial advantages to smartphones was that there really weren’t any viruses for it. After all, the technology was brand new. Older computers like traditional PCs had viruses that could still affect them today, even if they were created decades ago because a lot of the basic technology was the same. But with smartphones, the technology is quite new. And when they were first created a few years ago no one had really come up with viruses that could affect them. It looks like viruses are actually making their way onto smartphones now.

How Your Smartphone Can Be Infected

When you’re downloading all of your information to your smartphone directly from an approved app store, it’s easy to feel like you have nothing to worry about for viruses. But this is definitely not the case. For one thing, some app stores are less secure than others. It’s true that the Apple store tends to be safer since it’s completely closed off and only completely approved apps make it on their. But Google Play, the app store for Android phones is much more open. Google does its best to make sure that no one puts any viruses in their store, but when you have an open system this is going to inevitably happen now and again. Additionally, if you hook up your phone to your computer, viruses can download from one to the other, and many modern viruses are designed to jump the divide between PC and mobile phone. However, if you open any attachments on your phone, viruses can transfer this way, and Bluetooth is another vector by which viruses can transfer.

Theft

Another big problem these days is data theft. If you leave your phone out in the open and someone steals it, they can get all of your personal information. Even if you put a password protection on the phone, it’s not hard to guess just about any password given enough time, and there are also plenty of other ways to bypass such protection. Unless if you don’t leave your phone and have it stolen, people can often sill access your information since it’s on the network. For example, if you have personal information like your bank cards, social security number, phone number, address, and so on backed up on the cloud, then you should know that these are less secure than you might think. Every day, hackers are able to gain access to people’s private information through weak points like Dropbox, Skydrive, and other backup services. If they gain any of your private information they can use it against you by gaining access to your credit cards and spending a lot of money that you’ll be responsible for.