Your phone is essentially a spy’s playground.
As you sit there and read this, your phone might be going off with text messages and constant notifications from the apps you downloaded on to it. Most don’t even realize this, but your phone is where most of your personal information lies and it’s not really protected from hackers who might want to break into it and gather information.
Think about it. On your phone alone, you might have bank account login’s, email accounts and GPS coordinates on, all susceptible to being tracked at any given time, especially if it’s at the hands of someone malicious. Shit, the NSA has been collecting your data for years now (shout out to Heartbleed!). Corporations use your Internet moves to “market” to you better. And we all just sit there and blindly accept it.
Unfortunately there’s no real way of blocking such attacks yet, but your best bet is to stay aware and limit the amount of information you put out.
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In part three of Phreaked Out, we learn about how easy it is to mimic a wireless network and steal data through phishing, without the person even noticing. The scary part is, they also showed a phone transmitting information to a hacker (the person logged on to Facebook) and they weren’t even being on a wireless connection, just strictly on a 4G network.
Besides that, they showed “Project Snoopy” which special software and a drone that serves as a wireless hotspot and intercepted information from anyone connecting to it (they took it to a public park). The scary part was the info it collected and the levels of how deep it went. The fact a hacker can see the other wireless connections you connect to and then find out where they originate from is pretty insane.
Luckily, the point of this is to make people aware of how crazy their gadgets can make them vulnerable, but also so phone carriers can implement techniques to combat information from being this accessible. Unfortunately, it hasn’t happened yet.