Cyber secure your smartphone
Cyber secure your smartphone

Almost everywhere you go it feels as if a smartphone is only a few feet away from you, so how do you cyber secure your smartphone? For most of us, our smartphones have access to many of our personal and business accounts, sometimes no longer even requiring further authentication than the initial setup. They are small and easy to lose. Smartphones are also high theft items as there is a high resale value of these devices.

Our smartphone use

According to BrainSharper, Americans look at their smartphones on average 52 times per day. I know from personal experience that I definitely surpass this 52 times per day. How many times do you look at your smartphones? Because of the importance of these devices to us, they are also a cybersecurity risk. In some cases they have complete access to all of our personal and business accounts, along with control over IoT devices within our homes.

Cybersecuring your smartphones📱

There are numerous settings you can enable to help protect your smartphones. No one solution will fully protect you and even having a few of these enabled will not take away all cyber risk from your smartphones. These settings, when enabled though, will dramatically decrease your cyber risk.

Screen lock protection: Make it so someone can’t just pick up your phone and access it. Adding a passcode or password, facial recognition, thumb or finger print are all ways to secure access to your smartphones.

Device Encryption: Most of the newer smartphones come with encryption enabled once you enter in a passcode. Encryption protects your smartphone if you lose it or if it is stolen. When a cyber criminal finds your device, they will not be able to access the data on your phone, it will be scrambled if they try to access it.

Stay up to date: Just like our computers, our smartphones need operating system updates and all of our apps require frequent updates too. Make sure you check for these and update regularly to help ensure your smartphone is protected from cyber criminals.

Remote services: Maybe the most important of all of these, enable the “find my device” and “remote” wipe features of your smartphone. This will allow you to either find your device on a map if you lose your phone and more importantly delete all data on your device if it is unrecoverable.

For more on cybersecurity checkout Small Business, Big Threat!

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