Is a Phone Antivirus Good Enough?

August 30, 2016 Posted in Uncategorized by 1 Comment

A phone antivirus detects and blocks malware or anything suspicious / out of the ordinary. However, it doesn’t protect your phone from hackers.

Before hackers launch attacks, they identify their targets. If they launched mass attacks on 1.58 billion smartphones that are connected to the internet, antivirus programs would quickly detect the trend and thwart their attempt. The only way is to ‘fly under the radar’ by launching isolated attacks – there needs to a minimum number of such attacks for antivirus programs to classify the type of attack as a security threat and add it to their database so that users around the world are benefited when phone antivirus updates are downloaded.

Because they have only one shot, they need to make it count. To make the most out of their efforts, they specifically look for smartphones that have sensitive data from which they could make financial gains. Like banking login-password combinations and credit card information, for instance. How they figure out which phones are associated with these are by looking at their data traffic. If there is a lot of traffic between a smartphone and an internet banking site / e-commerce portal, the chances are that the user is more than a casual visitor to these websites.

phone

Source: Pixabay

And it is easy to find out how. Most of the time, hackers just hang out at malls, coffee shops, restaurants and other public places, looking just like any other person on his/her computer. But unbeknownst to many, their laptop is monitoring all internet traffic that takes place through the public/open Wi-Fi network. Data is sent and received in ‘packets’, and each packet has a source IP address and a destination IP address. It is easy to match IP addresses of web servers to their domain names, and the same network monitoring utility does this for them. This is how they find out who among the crowd have smartphones with ‘sensitive data’ – it could also be someone who connects to a secure office network – and launch attacks. Ransomware, where your data is locked up until you pay a hefty ‘ransom’ to them, is one of the latest ways in which they attack smartphones with confidential corporate/office data. But even getting their hands on your internet banking login/password or credit card information could mean a lot to them financially.

When they launch their attack, this type of attack has no history, according to the phone antivirus threat database, and the antivirus sometimes allows it to take place, since it doesn’t meet their criteria for ‘suspicious behaviour’. Antivirus programs are self-learning, but only after the first time can they learn. Unfortunately, it might be too late for you by then.

Protect yourself with a VPN

With a Virtual Private Network, a VPN server is placed between you and the internet. It encrypts all incoming and outgoing data – so hackers cannot view your online activity. They then have less incentive to attack you. Doing so without being certain only leads to antivirus programs blacklisting their scripts/programs, which take a lot of time and effort to come up with. So they wouldn’t risk attacking a phone they aren’t sure contains sensitive data.

One Response to “Is a Phone Antivirus Good Enough?”

  1. I would urge users to get additional security layers. There are plenty of good VPN service providers out there in the market who are promising 256 bit encryption, strict no log policy, agree or not, VPN has indeed become a need of the time, considering the amount of threats faced by internet users. I would suggest users to spare $5 per month and buy Purevpn, Express, Vypr etc though there are other vpn service providers as well and you are encouraged to do a comparison by yourself.

Leave a Comment