— Mobile

One Simple Step Can Thwart Phone Hackers From Stealing Your Info

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Sen. Angus King has reason to worry about hackers as a secretive Senate Intelligence Committee member. At a briefing by security staff this year, he said he got some advice on how to help keep his cellphone secure.

Step One: Turn off the phone.

Step Two: Turn it back on.

That’s it. At a time of widespread digital insecurity, it turns out that the oldest and simplest computer fix — turning a device off and then back on again — can thwart hackers from stealing information from smartphones. Regularly rebooting phones won’t stop the army of cyber criminals or spy-for-hire firms that have sowed chaos and doubt about the ability to keep any information safe and private in our digital lives. But it can make even the most sophisticated hackers work harder to maintain access and steal data from a phone. “This is all about imposing a cost on these malicious actors,” said Neal Ziring, technical director of the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate. The NSA issued a “best practices” guide for mobile device security last year in which it recommends rebooting a phone every week to stop hacking.

Thwart Phone

King, an independent from Maine, says rebooting his phone is now part of his routine.
I’d say probably once a week whenever I think of it,” he said.

Almost always in arm’s reach, rarely turned off, and holding vast stores of personal and sensitive data, cell phones have become top targets for hackers looking to steal text messages, contacts, and photos, track users’ locations, and even secretly turn on their video and microphones. “I always think of phones as like our digital soul,” said a security expert and former NSA researcher Patrick Wardle.

The number of people whose phones are hacked yearly is unknowable, but evidence suggests it’s significant. A recent investigation into phone hacking by a global media consortium has caused political uproars in France, India, Hungary, and elsewhere after researchers found scores of journalists, human rights activists, and politicians on a leaked list of what were believed to be potential targets of an Israeli hacker-for-hire company.

The advice to periodically reboot a phone reflects, in part, a change in how top hackers gain access to mobile devices and the rise of so-called “zero-click” exploits that work without any user interaction instead of trying to get users to open something that’s secretly infected. “There’s been this evolution away from having a target click on a dodgy link,” said Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, an internet civil rights watchdog at the University of Toronto. Typically, once hackers gain access to a device or network, they look for ways to persist by installing malicious software to a computer’s root file system. But that’s become more complex as phone manufacturers such as Apple and Google have strong security to block malware from core operating systems, Ziring said.

“It’s thought for an attacker to burrow into that layer to gain persistence,” he said. That encourages hackers to opt for “in-memory payloads” that are harder to detect and trace back to whoever sent them. Such hacks can’t survive a reboot but often don’t need to since many people rarely turn their phones off. “Adversaries realized they don’t need to persist,” Wardle said. “If they could do a one-time pull and exfiltrate all your chat messages, contact, and passwords, it’s almost game over anyway, right?” A robust market currently exists for hacking tools that can break into phones. Some companies like Zerodium and Crowdfence publicly offer millions of dollars for zero-click exploits.

And hacker-for-hire companies that sell mobile-device hacking services to governments and law enforcement agencies have increased. The most well-known is the Israeli-based NSO Group, whose spyware researchers say has been used worldwide to break into the phones of human rights activists, journalists, and even members of the Catholic clergy. NSO Group focuses on the recent exposés by a media consortium that reported the company’s spyware tool Pegasus was used in 37 successful or attempted phone hacks of business executives, human rights activists, and others, according to The Washington Post.

Facebook is also being sued in the U.S. by Facebook for allegedly targeting 1,400 users of its encrypted messaging service WhatsApp with a zero-click exploit. NSO Group has said it only sells its spyware to “vetted government agencies” for use against terrorists and major criminals. The persistence of NSO’s spyware used to be a selling point of the company. Several years ago, its U.S.-based subsidy pitched law enforcement agencies a phone-hacking tool that would survive even a factory reset of a phone, according to documents obtained by Vice News. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

But Marczak, who has tracked NSO Group’s activists closely for years, said it looks like the company first started using zero-click exploits that forgo persistence around 2019. In 2020, Marczak and Citizen Lab exposed another zero-click hack attributed to NSO Group that targeted several journalists at Al Jazeera. In that case, the hackers used Apple’s iMessage texting service.  He said victims in the WhatsApp case would see an incoming call for a few rings before the spyware was installed.”There was nothing that any of the targets reported seeing on their screen.

So that one was both completely invisible as well as not requiring any user interaction,” Marczak said. With such a powerful tool at their disposal, Marczak said rebooting your phone won’t do much to stop determined hackers. Once you reboot, they could send another zero-click. It’s a different model; it’s persistence through reinfection,” he said. The NSA’s guide also acknowledges that rebooting a phone works only sometimes. The agency’s guide for mobile devices has even simpler advice to ensure hackers aren’t secretly turning on your phone’s camera or microphone to record you: don’t carry it with you.

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Katie Axon

After leaving the corporate world to pursue my dreams, I started writing because it helped me organize and express myself. It also allowed me to connect with people who share my passion for art, travel, fashion, technology, health, and food. I currently write on vexsh, a site focused on sharing and discovering what it means to be a creative, passionate person living in today's digital age.

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