How to Know if Someone Is Spying on My Phone
Smartphones are smart, but hackers are getting smarter. Hackers are developing monitoring tools that have made it easier to monitor someone’s phone activities remotely. To use these apps, you don’t need any technical skills. At first, smartphone monitoring tools were used by parents to track children and companies to track employees. Surely not every company tracks their employees, but that is quite common practice.
Many people see their smartphones as secure digital havens. They use them to store personal information such as messages, pictures, credit card information, passwords, and notes. If you think your phone is your private zone; you’re wrong. Hackers can remotely access all your data without your knowledge.
To reduce the potential risk, here are tips to know if someone is spying on your phone, and how you can protect your phone from malicious attacks.
How Do I Know if Someone Is Spying on My Phone
- New Apps
When updating your phone, your phone manufacturer and service providers can install new apps to your device. Hackers can also install new malicious apps on your phone remotely. Whenever you see an app, you didn’t install google about them to know whether they are legit or not. If the app is from an unknown developer, delete it immediately. Here is a great guide on apps you shouldn’t have on your phone.
- Apps Not Working as They Used to
Are your old apps not working, as usual, something might be interfering with their functionality. Apps changing their behavior is a sign of malware presence in your phone. To solve this, review all your apps and delete those you didn’t install. Here are other reasons why your apps aren’t working.
- Battery Draining Faster Than Before
If your phone’s battery life has become shorter than before, it must be for a reason. There must be some unknown apps running in background mode. When an app is running in background mode, you can’t notice, but it takes your battery energy.
- Slow Performance
Slow operation speed doesn’t always mean your phone is old. Just like reduced battery life, slow performance is an indication of unknown apps running in the background. These apps use your phone resources (RAM and CPU), making it reduce its speed. Here are other reasons why your phone is slow.
- Getting Warm
It is okay for your phone to get warm when you’re on a call or using it, but if it gets warm even when it’s in your pocket, that is an alarm. It means that there is an unknown app running in the background that is making it work so hard.
Other Signs of Spying
Spike in data usage, suspicious texts, background noise when calling, unexpected shutdown, unknown numbers in your recent calls, your phone sending and receiving strange messages, inability to make calls even when you have good signal strength, emails sent from your phone blocked by spam filters and other suspicious behaviors are enough signs.
What to do when you see any of the above signs
Delete all apps you didn’t install, try running mobile anti-malware, and if possible, consider resetting your smartphone to go to its default settings.
Prevention is better than cure, to prevent your phone from being hacked, never click on any link you can’t see its full URL. When charging your phone with an unknown computer; choose charge only. Switch off the automatic connection to public WI-FIs. Avoid using the remember password feature. Don’t make online purchases using your card when on a public network. Lastly, put a password on your phone.
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