Your husband, cell phone spy? How to protect your digital privacy
Monitoring with your smartphone: Not a very common risk, but a real one. How to detect and stop unauthorized access to your smartphone.
An application to convict your partner of infidelity has enormous potential for abuse.
Photo: Getty Images
the Stalking programs It belongs to the horror chamber of malicious and malicious software. It is a program that turns a smartphone into a digital bug. It then intercepts text messages, tracks the phone's location, accesses photos and secretly takes photos or screenshots.
Stalkerware is closely related to the spyware we have known for a long time. But the perpetrators here are not intelligence services, hackers or professional data thieves, and the victims are not politicians, dissidents, top managers or celebrities. Stalking usually occurs in close and intimate relationships, where one partner wants to control and monitor the other.
Easy to find, easy to install
Security company Kaspersky Collects numbers for Internet stalking. According to this report, the year 2022 was knThe application affected 30 thousand people. In Switzerland there are 123. Most of the victims are in Russia, Brazil, India and… Iran. Kaspersky notes that this number only refers to its user base and is likely to be much higher overall. It is easy to find related programs on the Internet.
Instances of stalking within the Kasperski network are distributed by country; As of 2022.
Graphics: Kaspersky
It's also easy to install stalkerware. This applies if the perpetrator has direct access to the phone and the SPError code is known. FIf not, he would have to smuggle his spyware through a vulnerability, It is more technically demanding.
This results in the most important precaution: never give your smartphone to someone you don't trust – especially unattended.
Signs of stalking
Signs of spyware include strange phone behavior: a sudden drop in battery life, or the device overheating even when demanding applications are not running. High one Data consumption It may be an indication of such activities (More about it here), as well as a kind of “private life” of the phone, for example, if the screen turns on for no reason or errors occur when using the camera. Finally, strange background noises during phone calls are one suspicious sign.
However, such quirks also occur without stalkerware. They are relatively common and can in no way be considered evidence of third party access. The most obvious indicator is whether the person around you knows things about you that they couldn't and that you communicated via mobile device.
How to take defensive measures
What to do in case of suspicion? Review the apps you have installed and delete any you don't need at all, especially those that look unfamiliar.
Check permissions of alleged apps in settings and also change important logins if there is a possibility that passwords are being spied. The drastic procedure is to reset the device to factory settings. This results in the disappearance of spyware.
The Authorization Manager (left) can be used to detect Android apps that have access to sensitive information. On iPhone, spying attempts can be blocked using an emergency reset (right).
Photo: Matthias Schuessler (screenshots)
By resetting, you are blocking yourself But there is an opportunity to prove the prosecution and hold the perpetrator accountable. As a non-obvious measure, obtain or borrow another device for secure communication. Cleaning phone. Kaspersky uses Tinycheck (tiny-check.com). It scans traffic for suspicious transmissions, but it's not easy to use.
Safety check and emergency reset
iPhone is fundamentally more secure than Android phones. The reason is that Apple is restricting the app options more. It is important to remember that even standard functions can be abused.
On iPhone, there's a Security Check in your Privacy & Security settings: you can see who has access to your location and photos, and you can stop those sharing immediately with Emergency Reset. On iPhone there is also Block Mode under Privacy & Security. It is intended to serve as a defensive measure for sophisticated attacks across the network.
Technical defense is one thing. No less important is direct assistance to those affected. The Swiss Crime Prevention Agency provides advice and guidance on counseling centres skppsc.ch and police authorities, Here about From the Zurich police.
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