The smartphone is acting weird? This is how you know if someone is spying on you



In recent years, particularly in the year since the sensational under which Facebook enables companies to virtually unlimited access to our personal information, many began to worry that maybe privacy experts warn smartphones not just to scare us.

After all, smartphones have a lot of information - from access passwords for different accounts, or personal information to guess passwords help of these services, through correspondence with friends, work and family / potential partners to pictures that we would like to come into the wrong hands and be used to blackmail us.

The question is how to prevent outsiders from accessing information on our smartphone, especially when exposed to non-stop malicious apps who managed to get Google's app store (and sometimes even Apple) and reach millions of downloads. Even cautious users may be captured, and therefore, beyond prudence to download the application, you should pay attention to signs that may indicate that your smartphone spyware app wanted collects information about you and sends it to third parties or anyone else really wants.

9 reasons to suspect that you have a smartphone spy app


These are the key things you should check if you suspect someone has "invaded" your smartphone.

Use of cellular data

 

Spy apps send information that they collect from your phone to a party through the network. The less sophisticated apps among them may do this on mobile browsing - which will waste your browsing plan. It is very useful to keep track of cellular information consumption (Settings -> connections -> data usage) and notice if the graph suddenly pops up without a logical explanation, or if the list of most wasteful apps should not be there.


Battery usage 


Even if they find a way to disguise their activity by sending the information while connected to a WiFi network, where there is no restriction on browsing, spyware still causes another kind of waste - the battery. If your device's battery life suddenly shortens significantly (and we don't mean gradual erosion of devices older than one year, but a drastic drop in a few days) - usually, the explanation for this is that your device has a malicious app designed to spy on you. Particularly drastic reductions in battery life are caused by apps that record you using your device's camera and / or microphone (which, incidentally, is proof that Facebook does not).

Performance slowdown

A third type of waste that spyware causes is the device's working memory (RAM). Typically, if you run a lot of applications in parallel feel a decline in performance and you can close applications in the application are open - but if this app latent performance will go down even when multiple applications are open under management screen does not pass the bar is supposed to hit at the device (highly dependent on the model that you have).

 Sudden reboots


If your device reboots itself without any warning and without doing anything that caused it to warm up or crash, someone is likely to control it remotely. This means that besides getting the device to boot, it can probably also make calls on your account, snoop on information on the device, and turn on or stop recording from your cameras and microphones whenever it wants.

Problems turning off the device


On the other hand, there is also the opposite: spyware wants to send new information to their operators as quickly as possible. So if you have finished a call or photo sequence and tried to turn the device off or on and the power off was turned off or took longer than usual - this may be a sign that a spy app is in the middle of transmitting the new information and trying to delay the shutdown to finish its work first.


Phantom alerts  

Just as spyware can reboot your phone or delay a startup or shutdown, they can also turn it on - not off, but standby. If your screen suddenly lights up without explanation, or sounds an alert, and after you check you actually see no alert - a spy app could very well erase its own control alerts before you can see them, but not sophisticated enough to bypass the alert mechanism for The device that "informs" about the fact that something strange is happening.

 strange messages 

An even more "transparent" type of alerts that may indicate a spy app is mysterious SMS messages. Spy apps that are relatively inexpensive, the kind usually offered for a few dollars to spouses to check if you are cheating, are sometimes controlled by simple text messages, which instead of words contain certain patterns that the apps can interpret as commands. So, for example, if you receive messages like <startrec? Authcode = 71462> or <$ creenc @ pture? Length = 60s> (in fact, the intent of the command will be less transparent, these examples are only Illustration only) - a spyware application may not be able to communicate Covertly communicating with its operator via SMS (eg if the aggressive battery management on your device prevents it).

Strange noises during calls 

Know the clicks that give away eavesdropping to old phone lines? Like it used to be in movies. So today it doesn't work that way anymore, but other noises that appear during a call may indicate a third party who "participates" in it without your knowledge. However, you should remember that many noises stemming from one of the two-sided conversation does - such as with a wired headset to talk and play with the wire during the conversation, or move your finger very close to the microphone during the conversation.

Warming in standby mode 

We're not saying that every time the phone warms up it means spies after you - but if it happens when you're not using it, it should turn on a red light.

In general, one can say that any sudden change in behavior that is caused by a smartphone user's action - is suspicious, and the key lies in carefully monitored to detect and attention operation.