An Incredibly Simple Trick Can Help Make Your Phone More Secure - Forbes

Our online world is rife with threats, and not everyone is an expert in cyber security. Protecting yourself from those threats doesn’t always require expertise, however. In fact there’s one ridiculously simple trick that anyone can use to keep their phone more secure.

Ready? Here it is. Turn your phone off and then turn it back on.

Yes, that’s it — and it really is an effective security measure, despite the fact that the whole “turn off and on again” thing has become a technological trope.

This incredibly simple tip was shared recently at a security briefing provided to members of the U.S. Senate. There’s a very good reason members of Congress were being advised to make a habit of regularly powering down their phones.

It’s all down to the way cyber threats have evolved in recent years.

In the past, cyber attackers were focused on achieving persistence — that is making sure that an infected device stayed infected and under the attacker’s control. As malicious hackers increasingly turned their attention to smartphones, however, they discovered that persistence wasn’t necessarily required.

That’s because most smartphone users rarely power them down. We’ve become accustomed to treating charge in our phones’ batteries like fuel in the tank of our vehicles. Is your phone about to run out of juice? Quick! Plug it in to a wall charger or a portable battery pack before it does dead!

Hackers know this is how we treat our phones, so they’ve shifted to delivering mobile malware that runs in a phone’s memory. There’s simply no real incentive to write malicious code that can survive a reboot when no one is rebooting their phone anyway.

Turning your phone off and on may not be enough to thwart the likes of Israel’s secretive NSO Group or sophisticated state-sponsored hackers.

But since the process requires zero technical ability, only takes a minute or two and has the ability to expel common threats from your phone’s memory banks... why not make regular phone restarts a part of your security regimen?

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