How to spot a spy in your device?

At least once you must have had thoughts on the verge of paranoia that your device could be monitored by someone, and that it could be used to spy on you. The possibility of such surveillance hardly surprises anyone so far, rather we hope that our data is not interesting for anyone, and hackers will not be interested in our life. In fact, the victim of espionage for personal gain, or even as a joke, can be any of us. How to check if your phone is infected with a stalker or spyware? Told by the experts from the Roskatchestvo Digital Expertise Center.

In 2020, America leads in the number of users who encountered spyware on mobile devices. The number of such incidents has increased by almost 20 percent already for the first 6 months of the year. This suggests that everyone who owns a smartphone should learn to recognize spyware to keep themselves safe.

What’s at stake? Spyware, aka stalkerware, allows an intruder to see your photos, files and correspondence on your device, spy on your smartphone camera and record conversations. Some of these applications even allow remote control of the victim’s device. Why it’s still possible?

Legally, stalker programs are in a gray area: although cyber espionage is illegal, programs identical in functionality, such as tracking a child’s movements, are completely legal and it is often the developers who disguise their stalkerware malware as such . The experts at Roskatchestvo’s Center for Digital Expertise are already preparing a study of real parental control software, which will be released shortly.

Professional expensive stalkerware and spyware are almost impossible to detect without expert help. However, such programs are most often used by hackers for special cases, such as industrial espionage. For the average user, the instructions below can be effective. Please, do not take the security of mobile devices lightly, it may play a cruel joke on you.

Eliminate other viruses

On a smartphone it is not uncommon for the average user to have a multitude of applications, among which it is quite easy for a malicious program to get lost. However, you are not necessarily being spied on. If your smartphone is behaving atypically, it could be a lesser threat. For example, a virus showing adware adware , which is often added to an application downloaded from third-party sites or, in rare cases, even to an application from the official store.

Expert advice: Revise the apps on your smartphone. If you started getting banners, ads over other windows, advertising links opening by themselves, remember when exactly this started and what you installed. Often an anti-virus check helps to solve this issue faster.

Check your device’s behavior on the checklist:

Changes have been made to the phone settings that you didn’t make? For instance, you are now allowed to download applications from unknown sources.

You have an app installed which you don’t remember downloading?

Battery drains faster, device temperature rises, processes run slower? This may be related to battery wear and tear, but can also be a sign of increased “shadow” application activity.

Phone reboots on its own or behaves strangely?

The amount of traffic your gadget uses has increased?

Receive alerts when you try to log in to your account?

If you answered affirmatively to at least one question, it is a cause for concern.

The point of spyware is to make it as hard as possible to detect, so serious stalker software can work without provoking these signs. A specialist, however, can detect the presence of an alien program, for example, by detecting smartphone accesses to non-standard external addresses.

Even if a stalker program is detected and “pinned down”, removing it does not always “kill” the spy that makes copies of itself, pending tasks and other. Therefore, if you have a strong suspicion that your gadget is infected, it is recommended that you do a complete reset of your device and then configure it from scratch, or contact a cybersecurity specialist.

General recommendations on how to avoid spyware infection:

Don’t let other people use your smartphone. If you charge your smartphone from a charger in a public place, make sure that the adapter is powered from the mains and that there are no additional electronic devices on the cable.

Follow general anti-phishing rules phishing is used for the vast majority of infections : do not use links in e-mails and instant messengers, keep anti-virus on your computer and smartphone, update it regularly.

Carefully study the reviews and ratings of the apps you are going to download on your device. Android smartphones are generally less secure due to the features of the open-source operating system than the iPhone – there is a risk of catching a virus even when downloading an app from the official Google Play store.

Do not jailbreak your phone root-access, root-user rights, and so on . The benefits this brings are incomparable to the threats of privacy that open up.

Check your device security settings to see if you allow apps from unknown sources to be installed. You cannot download applications from unknown sources, period.

Uninstall all unnecessary apps to make it easier to navigate through the processes and control your device.

● Update your smartphone regularly. If your gadget is not updated and its support has been terminated by the manufacturer – it is high time to change it for safety reasons.

● Install two-factor authentication 2FA and a physical pin code on the devices themselves wherever possible. Change passwords on a regular basis.

Take care of your data and keep your smartphone clean, just like you keep your house in order. It affects not only usability, but also the security of sensitive data.