“Cybercriminals can view data stored on your phone, including credentials and financial information.”
Unlike the iPhone, the Android system is more fragmented, has open source, as well as a number of inconsistencies in standards that make themselves felt during software development. All these factors put Android devices at greater risk of data corruption or theft. In addition, a significant amount of trouble is associated with hacker attacks on Android phones.
Cybercriminals can view data stored on your phone, including credentials and financial information. Hackers can also track your location, use your phone to send messages to paid websites, or even infiltrate subscribers’ devices from your address book by sending them hidden malicious links (and since you will be the sender of such messages, there will definitely be users who will follow the hacker link).
And of course, state law enforcement agencies hack phones on quite legitimate grounds:
they keep copies of text messages and emails, record private conversations and track the location of suspicious persons. However, “black hackers” can certainly harm you by gaining access to bank details, deleting important data or introducing malware on your device.
Phone hackers have a number of advantages over computer hackers because they use special hacking methods that are easy to adapt to Android systems. A proven and effective type of attack is phishing – a set of criminal actions carried out by social engineering methods in order to force individuals or members of an organization to disclose confidential data. Since the phone screen accommodates a much smaller address bar compared to the PC screen, it is easier for phishing scammers to simulate one or another well-known website in a mobile browser, hiding from the user’s eyes the most vulnerable places that are usually visible on the desktop computer screen (for example, intentionally distorted spelling of the address). And then everything happens according to the usual pattern: You receive a notification from the bank asking you to log in to your account to solve an urgent problem, for which you just need to click on a conveniently located link and enter your details in the form fields. Having done these uncomplicated actions, you are actually handing your phone into the hands of hackers.
Trojan apps downloaded from unverified sources are another hacker tool that poses a threat to Android devices. The largest Android app stores (Google and Amazon) carefully check third-party software. However, in some cases, malicious programs manage to bypass the protection of reliable resources, not to mention other websites that are not so scrupulous about security issues. As a result, the phone system is hijacked by adware, spyware, ransomware and other unfriendly objects.