How easy is it for somebody to hack your cell phone, and secretly turn on your camera, and spy on what you’re doing? 2 easy ways someone can hack your cell phone. If somebody gets physical access to your phone, for example, your iPhone, and knows your passcode, it’s really simple.
There’s software that you could buy over the internet for a few hundred bucks. One of the sites is called FlexiSPY.com. and you could turn on somebody’s camera. You could read all their SMS messages, even the ones they’ve deleted. You could intercept their phone calls.
So if they’re calling somebody, there’s a way that you could interject yourself into the call, so you could actually eavesdrop on the communications. And scary enough, they could see your location. So it’s almost like having a GPS tracker on you. This does require that the bad person has physical access to the phone.
Who usually does this? A significant other, a disgruntled other. Somebody that might suspect you of cheating. The second way is remote exploitation. And that’s usually law enforcement, FBI, nation state, NSA. Exploits basically exploit yulnerabilitites in software.
And these exploits for iOS run for about $1.5 million or more. Android exploits are much cheaper, because it’s much easier to exploit an Android phone. So those only run about $200,000. And we all know that nation states that nation states pretty much have an unlimited budget. So if a nation state wants to compromise you, they could do it very stealthily, and you would never know it’s happening.
There’s no way to detect that you have malware on your device. One of the things that you can do to protect yourself and to protect your privacy is always make sure that you’re running the latest version of iOS that Apple releases.
Use a strong passcode on your cell phone, and don’t tell anybody. And if you ever suspect that your phone might be infected with malware, what you could do is you could just reload the firmware. What it does is it puts your iPhone at the factory settings so if there was any installed malware, that’s off your phone now.