Tech guru says PM's mobile advice not enough for peace of mind

Monday, 26 June 2023 10:00

Tech guru says PM's mobile advice not enough for peace of mind Featured

By Sam Varghese

Image by Stefan Coders from Pixabay

A well-known tech personality says the advice from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, to switch off mobiles once a day, may not be all that needs to be done to improve one's chances of avoiding security issues on devices.

Albanese was quoted in some Australian media as saying, "We all have a responsibility. Simple things, turn your phone off every night for five minutes. For people watching this, do that every 24 hours, do it while you’re brushing your teeth or whatever you’re doing."

In a blog post on Friday, Paul Ducklin, a long-time systems administrator who works with global security firm Sophos, said he was unsure why the PM had said five minutes. "Why at night? Why every day? Why for five minutes, and not, say, two minutes or 10 minutes?" he asked.

Rebooting a mobile phone would do some good in the case of non-persistent threats and no harm, he noted.

But, Ducklin said, "The problem is that most malware these days, especially secretive mobile spyware developed at the likely cost of millions of dollars, will be of the persistent threat sort, meaning that it won’t exist only in memory until the end of your current session and then evaporate like early-morning summer mist."

As an example, he pointed to the latest fixes issued by Apple for two zero-days, one in WebKit and one in the kernel.

"If attackers can only trigger the execution of unauthorised code inside your browser, then it’s likely that their malware won’t be able to escape from the browser process and therefore won’t be able to access or modify any other parts of the device," Ducklin said.

"The malware might therefore be limited to the current browser session, so that rebooting your phone (which would bump the browser software and its injected malware code out of memory) would indeed magically disinfect the device.

"But if the unauthorised code that the attackers run inside your browser via the zero-day WebKit bug follows up by triggering the other zero-day bug in the kernel, you are in a pickle."

He suggested the following additional steps to improve mobile security:

Uninstall apps that are not needed and delete all the associated data.
Log out from apps when they are not in use as the best way to avoid exposing data by mistake was to authorise oneself, and therefore one's device, to access it only when genuinely necessary.
Study how to manage privacy settings of all apps and services used.
Find out how to clear browser history and do so frequently.
Keep app access to the lock screen to the minimum.
Make the lock code as long as possible and lock time as short as could be tolerated.
Sharing should be done only if one knew what was being shared.
SIM cards should have a PIN code.

"A physical SIM card is the cryptographic key to your phone calls, text messages and perhaps some of your 2FA security codes or account resets," Ducklin pointed out.

"Don’t make it easy for a crook who steals your phone to take over the 'phone' part of your digital life simply by swapping your unlocked SIM card into a phone of their own. You only need to re-enter your SIM PIN when you reboot your phone, not before every call."

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