How to check if you are not being spied on your mobile phone

  I read a lot of different pieces of advice on how to detect espionage from your cell phone, some people advise you to check it with an antivirus or better with several ones. Forget it. If spyware is detected by antivirus software, it is no longer spyware. Antivirus will not help you in this case, and some popular antiviruses work as spyware themselves.

  Much more practical advice is about increased heating and accelerated battery discharge. No matter how talented the creator of the spyware is, it will be necessary for them to use the energy of the battery to overhear to the room constantly, and the battery consumption will inevitably increase. However, if spyware only works when the phone is active, this will have almost no effect on the battery.

Let’s still hope that the malefactors will want to listen-in to the perimeter around the phone all the time and thereby give themselves away. There are programs that analyze battery consumption and allow you to compare changes over the months. We will use this tool to look for indirect signs of mobile compromising.

You can experiment on your own by turning on a microphone on your device and leaving it for several hours, and then just have a look how much battery will be used up.

Remember, malware without problems can distort the data on the consumption of your mobile phone’s charge. Unfortunately, this is possible. Professionals developing spyware think every detail over, and battery consumption is not a trifle as well.

  Another interesting advice is outgoing traffic analysis. Not of the addressees of the requests, since spyware masks the exchange of data with the managing server, we are only interested in the amount of data transmitted. Imagine a situation when your phone has been compromised and is now recording all your calls, overhearing the room, data from the camera and other information. The collected information will weigh dozens or even hundreds of megabytes, which must be sent to the management server, and not just once sent, but collected and sent every day.

Definitely, you can hide the fact of sending, but the amount of information transmitted cannot be hidden. As part of the course, we will teach you to analyze the amount of data transmitted by applications to the servers, and you can always detect suspicious activity. This test will not be redundant for every reader of this chapter.

This is where you can conduct a practical experiment by turning on the recorder for a few hours and see how much memory is needed for recording.

Another popular online advice is about setting up a firewall on a mobile device. Firewall is a great thing, and we will set it up as part of our course, but against spyware it will not help you in any way. Spyware programs are perfectly able to mask their traffic, letting it on open ports as if being legitimate.

Some experts suggest paying attention to the strange behavior of the device, such as turning on the screen backlight when the phone is in an inactive state. This may indeed be a sign of spyware software, but only of very poor quality, not adapted to work with your phone model.

I cannot ignore the popular advice to check the list of running processes. We will teach you, within the course, to check the processes running on your mobile device, but this will not protect you from professional software for cyber espionage, as the developers’ one of the first tasks is to conceal the process.

I don’t want to talk about hiss in the handset, the delay of the beeps, and other interferences, since this is all nonsense. Overhearing calls at the phone level is a passive process that does not affect the quality of communication. You can use any legitimate application to record calls and make sure that their quality will not be affected.

If you suspect that your device will be compromised by spyware, remember that resetting data will not save you from professional software that has been registered in the firmware. Even a complete reinstallation of the system will be powerless, and therefore, if you are a person interesting for influential malefactors, simply change your mobile phone periodically.