How Do I know if My Phone has been Hacked?

Our smartphones are our lives. We do everything on them and
spend a lot of time. All major mobile phone manufacturers and application
developers had to start introducing digital health features to curb our
addiction.

However, if hackers can hack our Android or Apple iPhone phones, then they will be able to use all our content. Our personal information includes bank account and credit card details, social media accounts, phone activity and text messages, shopping records, and everything we see on the Internet.

Have you recently used any public Wi-Fi networks or connected
unknown devices via Bluetooth? Your phone may have been hacked. That’s why we will now guide you through some steps. You can follow these steps to check if your phone has been hacked.

How to find out if your phone has been hacked

There are many things to be aware of, which may indicate that your phone has been hacked. These are separate simple questions and should be studied separately. However, if you encounter some of these problems, you should consider handling them as a whole.

1. Your device is hotter than usual

If your phone is hacked, many unauthorized programs will run in the background behind the operating system. These might be things like adware, spyware, Trojan horses, all of which make money for different types of hackers in different ways.

These will put additional pressure on the processor and memory of the device. In turn, this will cause the processor to heat up above normal levels. If your device is hotter than usual, try to find out why. If you can't explain it in a simple way, some trouble may occur.

2. Your battery can’t last long enough

Excess heat also increases power. Even if you don't feel the high temperature, you may still notice that the battery drains much faster than before. Again, this may be due to unknown programs always running in the background.

3. You seem to be using more data than usual

Most malicious programs running in the background will connect to the Internet to perform the operations they are programmed to perform. For example, transferring your data to a third-party server or showing you advertisements that would not normally appear. If you are not connected to Wi-Fi, mobile data will be used. Check your data usage.

4. Your call message record includes the calls you have not made and the messages you have not sent

If the malware that infects your phone has the authority to
make calls or send messages, then this may cost you a huge price. Some hackers will program the malware to call their own premium rate phone lines, which may result in increased charges per minute.

The same is true for SMS messages. If you find an outbound phone number you don't know or a phone number you don't remember, please contact your network provider immediately.

5. Compared to the past, you see more pop-up ads

As we just mentioned, one way for hackers to make money is by
increasing advertising-based revenue. They do this by forcing victims to view more advertisements than usual. If you notice more ads than usual, your phone may have been infected with adware, and it may have been hacked.

6. There are new apps on your phone that have not been installed yet

Always pay attention to the apps on the phone. For one of many reasons, hackers may try to install the wrong application. If there is something there and you don't remember how it got there, it may be installed remotely by a malicious third party.

7. Your phone is not working

As we have already mentioned, hackers will try to install their secret programs on your device. These will try to do many things but will run in the background without your knowledge. It can be inferred that if your phone runs various additional small programs and protocols in the
background, it will not be able to perform its normal functions efficiently.

What should I do if my phone is hacked?

If your phone has been hacked, you must act quickly to determine if the malware has made unauthorized payments or unauthorized call charges on the phone bill, and then try to recover the funds. Therefore, you should learn more about network security and improve your security level.

What can a hacker do with a mobile phone?

Watching videos and playing games? Wrong!

One sentence summary: Any attack that a computer can launch can be launched by a mobile phone. In situations where computers are not convenient, mobile phones can sometimes even receive miraculous effects.

Control the server to launch an attack

Generally speaking, most hackers have a lot of server resources in their hands. They can connect to the remote server via SSH on the mobile phone, and then command the remote server to launch an attack.

For example, as shown in the figure below, I used Juice SSH to log in to my
remote server, and launched an SQL injection scan on a page that I flipped to.

JuiceSSH

With this idea, any mobile phone that can be launched by a computer can be launched without the restriction of specific systems or hardware devices. Even a mobile phone borrowed from the roadside can launch a cyber-attack within five minutes.

The phone itself can launch an attack

This kind of thinking is more limited. Basically don't think about iPhones, and consider Android devices. If you follow this line of thought, let me
introduce the famous Kali NetHunter. It is an Android system deeply customized and developed by the Kali team. It mainly supports Nexus devices and supports the following very chewy attack methods:

*Fake Wi-Fi hotspots, such as building a fake airport Wi-Fi/Starbucks Wi-Fi to connect to other people and monitor their network traffic. Take a look at what websites the people sitting around you are on, and whether they are posting strange little yellow texts.

*Supports BadUSB hijacking, you attract the attention of the victim, plug this device into his computer, it will swipe to open a PowerShell window to execute a series of commands, and the computer will be taken down.

* Equipped with a full set of toolkits of Kali Linux, such as commonly used NMAP, SQLMap, Metasploit, even without a remote server, there are many attacks that can be launched.

The only regret is that Kali NetHunter has not been updated for a long time. It’s not clear if anyone is working on a similar system on Pixel phones. If you have any knowledge, please introduce it in the
comment section.

To sum it up

Although it is difficult to launch a hacker attack through a mobile phone, and it is difficult to type on a small screen, this form of attack is still necessary to study-because the related equipment is very portable and has a high degree of concealment.

If you see someone in a corner of the company holding a computer crackling on the keyboard, and the screen is full of things you can’t understand, you will at least look at this person a few more times. However, if the person is holding a mobile phone, you at most feel that this person is secretly chatting with people on WeChat during working hours.

This concealment and mobility will give the attacker a significant advantage. For example, the security team discovered attack traffic from an unknown source, but during the follow-up, the other party had already sneaked upstairs with his mobile phone and changed the MAC address at random, which caused some trouble in tracking. Of course, if you are fully prepared, you can still spot these attacks and react accordingly when they occur.

Stay safe and protect your devices!