Phone hacking is one of the more sophisticated technical ways of acquiring your personal and financial information. It's not much different than hacking into your computer, because smartphones are just that. Portable, mobile computers. With the increased use of smartphones, how easily accessible the internet has become, along with the advent of social media platforms, it's not hard to see how easily personal information can be shared and utilized to impersonate someone to gain access to other accounts, attached to their name.
This is why it's imperative that you be more vigilant than ever, when it comes to safeguarding your stuff; including your identity. Most hackers and scammers tend to go for the easiest target first, and then work their way up, from there, in terms of level of difficulty. This happens as a result of what the hacker stands to gain from successfully accessing your financial and personal information. Since this is a never-ending always evolving practice, I have listed below some pointers' that suggest your device might have picked up some malware that aids in transmitting your information, unknowingly, thus making you an easier target.
If you notice your phone is running slower than usual- While this can be the result of several things; normally you can pinpoint the exact chain of events that lead to your phone slowing down, overtime. Whether's it's accumulated updates throughout the lifetime of ownership of your device, the amassed data, that's stored on your phone from all of the apps downloaded; or even the regular data that's taking up space such as pictures and other files. In the absence of these factors, your phone slowing down suddenly and tremendously is a good indicator that malware or spyware is on your phone and feeding your info to an external source. That process is what is causing/ contributing to the degraded performance of your phone.
Your phone either heats up or overheats quickly- Temperature variables aside, similar to the previous point, if you notice your phone is heating up quickly and you're not overclocking, over utilizing or running a resource intensive application or game on your device, chances are whatever malware/spyware that's on your phone is feeding your information back to the host, externally. This action can contribute to the high temperatures being generated, while seemingly being in normal use by you.
You are getting strange pop-ups, multiple unsolicited ads- If you're surfing the interwebs, on your device and notice that the websites you normally visit have more frequent and pervasive ad's and pop-ups, and there is a marked difference between your experience's there. This can indicate that something has downloaded on your phone is running in the background causing this distortion, to how it normally operates. To test this, I often suggest going to the same website on other devices to see if the changes on your device, appear elsewhere. If so, then the website is to blame, if not, then run a virus scan on your phone immediately.
Frequently visited websites now look different in your browser-This is a dead giveaway that you have a virus or some form of malware on your device. If you notice that websites you frequently visit all of a sudden look "different", are redirecting to another website or just isn't loading or operating the way it used to before; your device is definitely infected with malware and you need to run a virus scan immediately.
You notice strange phone numbers, texts and e-mails that you didn't originate- Also includes seeing mysterious apps appear on your phone, where you have no recollection, of downloading them. Often times, if a person has been hacked, this symptom is what I call the "calm" before the storm. Reason being is because by the time things get to this point, the hacker already has other personal information, from your device, in their possession.
Aside from running a virus scan immediately I highly suggest you check all of your bank and financial accounts (on another non-infected device) and put a lock on any and everything that may be accessible to anyone who has your username and password or any information, they can use to that end. This is a good time to change passwords and set up multi-factor authentication, including resetting your phone back to a factory reset.
While I personally advice having your data backed up and syncing elsewhere to a cloud account, I suggest this level of caution, as whatever is feeding your information to a third party; needs to be stopped immediately. While not knowing to what extent the damage that was done; the sooner we mitigate it, the better off you'll be.
While this gives you a brief overview of how to avoid being hacked in general, you can still utilize the tips here to better protect yourself behaviorally, no matter what device you use. There are a few anti-virus software options (some are free) that you can employ to help scan for malware, spyware and worms and other viruses' on your desktop and mobile devices in addition to helping to get rid of them. One that I often employ is Avast. McAfee and Norton are also two other choices to pick from. These brand's have options that are available for download on both your laptop, desktop and mobile devices.
While surveying the habits and patterns that often put you at risk, I implore you to make the behavioral changes, as soon as you become aware of them. The quicker you implement what you learn, the faster it sticks and the more beneficial it is to you in the long run. There's always something you can do to protect yourself from being a target and making it harder for hackers to easily glean your personal information. For a shorthand way to keep these reminders accessible to you, please refer to the checklists below that denote if your mobile device has been hacked.
How to tell if your Android is hacked
How to tell if your iPhone is hacked
