The National Security Agencythe US National Security Agency, recently published a document that includes recommendations for thwarting the shady activities of hacker. In the Mobile Devices Best Practiesas the title suggests, is about smartphone and related suggestions for making them safer. But how effective are these measures?
Does restarting your smartphone do any good?
Among those indicated in the document, the advice of is particularly controversial turn off your smartphone at least once a week (to avoid keeping it on for more than 168 consecutive hours), so as to to interrupt in the most drastic way possible any data theft due to IT vulnerabilities.
As regards zero-click attacks (those that do not require any user action) and zero-day attacks (those that exploit vulnerabilities not known to companies that supply software and/or hardware), according to ANSA’s fact-checking, restarting the smartphone provides no guarantee. There are benefits, this is undeniable, such as terminating malicious processes in execution or freeing up memory used for temporary files and restoring system security settings, but as regards the two attacks just mentioned, turn off the computer once a week. your iPhone or Android smartphone is almost useless.
Moving on to malwarethe practice of weekly reboots could only help in case of malicious code does not have a persistence mechanism and is therefore destined to cease its activity as soon as the smartphone is turned off. However, ANSA still points out that now there are very few malware of this type: all or almost all of them use persistence mechanisms to be as effective as possible.
How to protect your smartphone and personal data: some tips
Restarting your smartphone is therefore not a miraculous practice that wipes out every type of cyber threat. Precisely for this reason, it would be appropriate follow a few simple rules to protect everything stored on your smartphone, as well as the device itself.
- Do not use public Wi-Fi networks
- Do not charge smartphones (but also tablets and laptops) using public charging stations (stations, shopping centers and so on)
- Don’t open attachments and links shared by suspicious contacts
- Download software updates and/or security patches as soon as possible
- Disable Bluetooth when not in use
- Disable location services when you don’t need them
- Install applications only from trusted sources, such as Play Store and App Store
- Use a passcode to log in to your device and, on devices that allow it, use a biometric authentication method, such as Face ID