Phone Hacking: Are we safe?

Recent international news about the hacking of celebrities phones by news reporters from News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper published by News International, are doing the rounds. The allegations state that the individuals and reporters working for the newspaper are engaged in phone hacking. All this has brought mobile phone security into the spotlight again.

All said and done, the average citizen has started to worry about their privacy. Is phone hacking more serious and going to affect even the average person using a cell phone? The answer is the average person has nothing to worry about as the targets are mostly high profile celebrities, politicians or newsmakers.

The average mobile phone user should worry about other threats that involve social engineering exploits and malware threats. Smartphone users, especially Android based phone users, are more at risk of getting infected. Due to the popularity of Android phones and its open source nature, it has attracted attention of cyber criminals as their next easy target after Windows PCs.

Since Google allows third party applications on their open source Android OS, it has become easier for malware writers to plant a Trojan or malicious application in the Android Market or even at other places. There are several malicious tools that make phone tapping and phone tracing easy which can be misused by those who are interested in hacking somebody’s phone or tracing someone’s phone activities.

We recommend that smartphone users be cautions when downloading/installing any new application to their phone and install a good mobile security software on the phone. We are happy to inform that Quick Heal Mobile Security for Android will soon be announced.

Want to learn more about the feature sets? Sign-up for our launch program at:
https://quickheal.com/android/

Sanjay Katkar