June 28, 2022

How to check your phone for spyware

Spyware is steals personal data from mobile devices and sends it to malicious servers. "Spyware can be silent or intrusive. The silent ones work in the background, they try not to make their presence known in the system, their main task is to collect information. The intrusive ones are spy apps, which fill the gadget with advertising messages, thus greatly slowing down its work, and the developers earn money for each accidental click on a banner.

The dangers of spyware

Spyware applications for Android are dangerous because they keep a close eye on the device owners. Through spyware, unclean programmers steal:

  • message texts,
  • call history,
  • GPS coordinates,
  • authorization data from the browser,
  • photos,
  • video recordings,
  • audio recordings of phone calls.

You may think that nothing special is stored in your phone. For example, texting, you may use it infrequently, but don't forget about mobile banking. All the app has to do is snatch a one-time password for online banking authorization from the text message, and your bank account becomes available to third parties. The same way - through the password in the message - they steal pages in social networks, electronic wallets, and access to corporate sites.

As a rule the fraudulently obtained call history is added to the paid databases for sending commercial messages. So, if you've been actively spammed, it's possible someone in your contact list has been hacked via spyware.

With multimedia, it's pretty clear: No one likes pictures and recordings from private archives to end up online. Especially when it comes to intimate photos. Swindlers can even demand money for an especially vivid "strawberry", but there is no guarantee that when you pay the blackmailer, he will really get rid of the stolen content of someone else's phone gallery.

How to know if your phone is infected

It's hard to spot a spyware app without antivirus. Indirect signs of an infected device:

1. Reduced battery life. You can analyze the battery consumption in "Settings - Device Maintenance - Battery".

2. Unknown where the mobile Internet traffic is going. You can check the traffic consumption through "Settings - Connections - Mobile data usage".

3. Appearance of advertising messages in Android interface. This most often occurs after the installation of applications from dubious sources. In this case, you can be advised to uninstall recently installed applications.

How to remove spyware

The most radical way to remove spyware is considered to be formatting the internal memory with a simultaneous reset of the smartphone to factory settings. But some particularly cunning spyware survive such a bombardment of action, because they manage to infect system files. Therefore, if you decide to reset and format, still check the gadget with one of the popular anti-viruses after the first launch.

Source: https://mrspyer.com/


Useful Resources:

https://vivo.tribe.so/post/what-is-a-vpn-service-and-how-to-choose-a-vpn-provider-62b9a832cc637b7cc475beec

https://vipfun.xyz/read-blog/16213

https://aminoapps.com/c/thehackzone/page/blog/how-to-bypass-a-blocked-vpn-and-stay-undetected-online/qpQl_kZhRuNNRwPrBJjBmJjQrmYWJJK1K

https://learninghub4hrh.org/blog/index.php?entryid=255052