Tag Archives: smartphones

Tips to help protect your professional Apps

international-workers-day

Smartphones have become vital to our existence, accompanying us in our day-to-day lives, both at work and at home. Since May 1st is International Workers’ Day, we are celebrating by reviewing some of the top applications we believe are most useful for our professional success.

“Top” Apps for professionals

These app icons saturate our phone screens, but with good reason. Today, there is an app for everything. Apps offer a wide range of possibilities and solutions, helping us organize our tasks and merge our professional and personal lives.

  • Evernote: Positioning itself as the office of the future, this app allows you to write, compile, find and submit documents in any electronic device working in a synchronized manner.
  • Google Drive: Through the app you can create and access shared information through any device, making long-distance teamwork both easy and efficient.
  • Dropbox: This mass storage tool is one of the more popular apps, allowing you to share information using multiple devices.
  • Skype: With more than 300 million users, the mobile app includes many of the same benefits as the desktop version like video calls, audio calls, and messaging. This program has become an important tool for those who have work relationships abroad.
  • Hootsuite: This platform allows you to access various social media accounts from one place. It has become one of the star tools to manage your online social life, both for social network experts and regular users.
  • Salesforce: We cannot lose sight of one of the best business tools for CRM. This important application provides an interface for task management and case management. It also has a customer portal area, with social media plugins and analysis tools, allowing us to foster relationships with our clients and develop new ones.

Black Hats in your work environment?

 

Even though we do our best to make our Smartphones as secure as possible, sometimes there are vulnerabilities, like large amounts of malware waiting to take over your phone. As seen above, there are a variety of applications waiting to be downloaded and used to help you on your journey up the career ladder. However, we must keep in mind that there are some risks that come with installing anything downloaded off the internet.

Black Hats frequently use apps as keys to “get into” our phones. If you use them as work tools or to share sensitive and private data, you should think about downloading an antivirus.

We have some tips when downloading these applications. First of all, “avoid the black market” and download your apps in authorized stores that are reliable. Secondly, choose apps with official developers (these will always be more secure). Thirdly, pay attention to the number of downloads (if there are more than 1,000, we can consider it a popular app and reduce the possibilities of giving problems.) Lastly, review the feedback from other downloaders to make sure it is a good one.

Current Smartphone attacks have put device security and personal information in danger, which is especially hazardous when your devices are connected with your work-life. Prevention is the best possible thing you can do to guarantee your security.

Here at Panda Security, we hope you continue in the fight against cyber-threats and keep on protecting your work-life. Have a great weekend and a wonderful International Workers’ Day!

The post Tips to help protect your professional Apps appeared first on Panda Security Mediacenter.

How to thoroughly wipe your phone before selling it

Make sure your Android phone is wiped clean before you sell it.

Every day, tens of thousands of people sell or give away their old mobile phones. We decided to buy some of these used phones to test whether they had been wiped clean of their data. What we found was astonishing: 40,000 photos including 750 photos of partially nude women and more than 250 male nude selfies, 750 emails and texts, 250 names and addresses, a collection of anime porn, a complete loan application, and the identity of four of the previous phone owners.

How did we recover so much personal data?

The problem is that people thought they deleted files but the standard features that came with their operating system did not do the job completely. The operating system deleted the corresponding pointers in the file table and marked the space occupied by the file as free. But in reality, the file still existed and remained on the drive.

With regular use of the device, eventually new data would overwrite the old data but since the person was selling the phone, that never happened and the files were still intact.

It works the same way on your PC. I used free software to recover deleted photos that I thought were missing forever because they had not been overwritten yet.

You can permanently delete data with Avast Anti-Theft

Avast’s free app for Android, Avast Anti-Theft, actually deletes and overwrites all of your personal files. All you do is follow these steps to delete personal data from your smartphone before you sell it or give it away.

1. Install Avast Anti-Theft on your Android device. The app is free from the Google Play Store.
2. Configure Avast Anti-Theft to work with your My Avast account. This gives you remote access to your phone through your PC.
3. Turn on the thorough wipe feature within the app.
4. Log in to your My Avast account from a PC to wipe your phone. This will delete and overwrite all of your personal data.

Follow Avast on FacebookTwitter, YouTube, and Google+ where we keep you updated on cybersecurity news every day.

Can they spy on you through your smartphone microphone?

Smartphone spy App
Smartphone users are highly sensitive about privacy, not least because so much personal data is stored in just a few square centimeters. We shudder at the thought of what happened to Jennifer Lawrence and company, and that it may happen to us; someone spying on our most intimate data.

Yet that’s not all we should be wary of: There are some spy programs that can even remotely activate the microphone on your device and record you. One of the most infamous of these is StealthGenie, a spyware app that behaves like a Trojan and supports iOS, Android and Blackberry. It can geolocate the device, listen to conversations, capture messages and images and even activate the microphone, tracking all your actions throughout the day.

A company video claimed that the app had more than 100,000 satisfied customers, though it looks like the game is now up. Last October the company’s CEO was arrested in the USA for promoting and selling this phone monitoring app..

It is paradoxical at least that this arrest should have occurred in the United States, where it has been revealed, thanks to Edward Snowden, that the government has been spying on the phones of so many users around the world. Such revelations from the CIA’s ex security analyst revealed that the NSA was using all types of systems to spy on smartphones, even using apps such as Angry Birds. And you thought killing a few pigs from your cell phone wouldn’t have any consequences!

A simple search will return a host of apps that promise to enable you to spy on your neighbor’s phone. So next time you need to visit the bathroom, perhaps it’s best not to take your phone with you.

smartphone spy

Researchers at Stanford University have been analyzing these apps and the ease with which our phone mikes can be turned against us. For this purpose they have developed their own app, Gyrophone, which turns the phone gyroscope into a means for capturing acoustic signals between 80 and 250 Hz (e.g. the human voice). This demonstrates how easy it is to spy on users.

By using this app, they have shown that it is possible to identify both the person speaking as well as what they are saying by measuring the acoustic signals in the vicinity of the phone. The researchers have already demonstrated this on Android devices and are now working on iPhone.

Other universities are also concerned about smartphone spying. Researchers at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto have analyzed the Italian ‘Hacking team’ spyware. They have worked out how it manages to store all user information, take screen grabs, record audio conversations, use the GPS tracker or activate the microphone when users are connected to a public Wi-Fi network.

The researchers have also uncovered the existence of 350 servers in 40 countries around the world storing data from this tool. Are governments around the world using these tools to monitor our every move?

So if you thought that tapping phones in hotel rooms, with a group of police or high-tech criminals monitoring all conversations belonged only in spy movies, you were wrong. Be aware that your smartphone, which you always keep within arm’s length so as not to feel lonely, is potentially a tool for spying on every sound you make. All you can do is be more careful with your phone security and pray that your life is so boring that nobody wants to spy on you.

More | 10 Reasons to install an Antivirus on your phone or Android Tablet

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