In June last year, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, during the appointment of Australia’s first National Cyber Security Coordinator, said that everyone should turn off their mobile phones for five minutes at night. The aim was to prevent or at least make possible cyber attacks more difficult. Does this make sense?
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has published a report in which cites several threats that can affect our mobile phones. Malicious apps can infect your phone. Malicious Wi-Fi networks can intercept and reroute your device’s traffic. Spyware can monitor audio and video conversations on your phone. Hackers with remote access to your device can collect call or text message data. Someone with physical access to your phone, even briefly, could, of course, install malware or spyware.
And to avoid this, he recommends 10 different actions, among them turning off the phone once a week, a figure quite far from doing it daily. And yet doing so, according to the NSA, only sometimes prevents problems.
According to Paul Ducklin, a systems expert at cybersecurity firm Sophos, “I’m not sure why the Prime Minister has said five minutes. Why at night? Why every day? Why for five minutes and not, say, two or ten minutes? While rebooting a mobile phone is good for non-persistent threats, The problem is that most of the current malware“especially the secret mobile spyware developed at a likely cost of millions of dollars, will be a persistent threat, meaning it will persist on the phone even when we turn it off.”
So, the best way to prevent problems is to follow the advice of the NSA and Most cybersecurity experts: do not connect to unknown networks, do not open files from sources we do not know, do not keep Bluetooth connected at all times and download apps from official stores. And finally, update the operating system frequently.