Although coverage on our mobile devices continues to improve,
there are still certain areas where it's very difficult
to get a wireless signal.
This means you're not able to use your wireless provider's
network and there's no 802.11 network to connect to
for wireless Wi-Fi.
If you are connecting to Wi-Fi network in a public area,
such as a coffee shop or a hotel,
you want to be sure to use a Virtual Private
Network, or VPN.
This will encrypt all of the data sent
from your mobile device to the VPN concentrator.
If anyone does look into the wireless network,
they won't be able to see any of your data within those packets.
You might also want to use your mobile device to provide
internet access using a tether.
This is a bit more secure than using a public Wi-Fi network,
since it's a bit more difficult to capture information being
sent to the carrier's network.
If you're not sure if you have a good connection
to the carrier's network, there's
many third party utilities that can perform a cell tower
analysis and run a speed test to that carrier's network.
A mobile device that has the power draining
faster than expected could be a security issue.
There may be an application that is using more CPU than you
would expect or there may be more network communication
than normal.
In either case, you effectively have a denial of service
as this device is rapidly losing its power and at the same time
using all of the resources of that mobile device.
Before installing an application onto a mobile device,
you may want to check to see if that particular application is
legitimate.
Something like ZAP, which Zscaler's Application Profiler
can give you information on how safe an application might be.
If you happen to find an app that
is using all of these resources, you
may want to try to force stop that running app
by using the built in app cancellation
features of your mobile device.
Some mobile operating systems support anti-malware running
on that device, so you can see what apps are safe to use.
And if you're just not sure, you can always
perform a clean install.
A factory reset will delete everything on that device.
And then you can install known good apps back
to the mobile device.
A malicious app could also create a situation
where the data network is becoming slower and slower.
If the app is sending a lot of data to your mobile provider
and puts you over a limit, your mobile provider
may turn down the speed of your connection.
You can always run a network connection analysis,
like a Wi-Fi analyzer, to see exactly what data is being
sent from your mobile device.
And of course, it's always helpful
if you know that you're on a trusted Wi-Fi network that's
using encryption.
You can check the overall network speed
with a third party app.
They can see exactly how much information
you're able to send back and forth from your phone.
There are also cell tower analyzer apps
that can tell you exactly how much data you're sending
to your mobile provider.
It's very possible that an app that's running on your device
is sending something that you weren't expecting, especially
if there are a large file transfers or constant network
activity.
So it may take a bit of research to find that particular app
and remove it from your mobile device.
The reason there is a specific Bluetooth pairing process
is to prevent devices from connecting
to each other automatically.
You always want to check your Bluetooth list
and make sure that you're not connecting to a device
that you weren't expecting.
You can always go to that list and remove any of the devices
that you don't recognize and later
on if you need to re-pair to that device,
you can always do that.
One way to be sure that you're definitely not sending
any Bluetooth data to that device
is to disable the Bluetooth radio completely.
And after you do that, you may want
to perform an anti-malware scan on the device
to make sure that all of your apps are secure.
Our mobile devices contain a wealth of personal information
and the attackers want access to that data.
If you happen to see that there's
unauthorized access to your device
or your personal information is somewhere
you weren't expecting, you want to find the source of that leak
and make sure that no one is able to get any more
information from your mobile device.
A good first step is to determine
where that data came from.
You may want to perform an app scan or an anti-malware scan
on your device and make sure that all of your apps
are safe to use.
If this data did leak from your device,
it would be highly recommended to perform a factory reset
to make sure that you have completely removed any malware
from your mobile device.
And of course, it could be that the leak is not
coming from your mobile device, but it
may be coming from the place that your mobile device puts
its data.
We store in a large amount of data
these days out in the cloud.
And if somebody gains access to your cloud account,
then they would effectively gain access to the data you
access on your mobile device.
You want to check the passwords on Apple iTunes, iCloud,
your Apple Configurator, Google Sync, OneDrive.
Dropbox, and any of the other online
cloud-based storage systems.
Another piece of private information
that should remain private on your mobile device
is tracking information.
Your mobile device knows exactly where you
are at any time during the day.
And being able to track exactly where you are
and where you have been can be valuable information
to an attacker.
If you think there's an app that's tracking your location,
you can run an anti-malware scan to see if you can identify
what app that might be.
You could also check the apps that you've
loaded on your device with an offline app scanner
to get more understanding of what those apps are doing.
And if you think this tracking is occurring,
you may want to perform a factory reset which
deletes everything on your mobile device
and restore from a known good backup.
Our mobile devices have cameras and microphones on them,
which would be a valuable resource for someone who's
trying to gain information from you.
If you think that any of the apps on your device
are capturing this information, you
want to perform a malware scan to see
if you can identify those.
There are also offline third-party scanners
that can tell you if applications
happen to be legitimate or not.
And ultimately a factory reset would
allow you to delete any malicious software
on that mobile device and allow you to restore
from a known good backup.