We are all used to the problem of spying on our smartphones. The phone does not need to be monitored by governments. However, many parties with malicious intentions like hackers and even our ex-friends can hack our phones by implanting a simple spy tool on the phone, and immediately everything the victim does on the phone is there, whether conversations, phone calls, web pages they visit, purchases and sales they make and much more.
The only question we repeatedly ask ourselves is: “How do you know if your phone is monitored and what are the signs? It is not one or two signs, but there are many. Let us check them.
1- Battery problems
Many factors cause the battery to drain and overheat from time to time, like watching too many videos or playing games. That is normal in most cases, and no need to worry. However, you should only be concerned if you notice the charging capacity is running out faster than usual or a significant increase in the temperature of the phone even though you are not using it with any heavy apps that cause it to heat up like this. Even though those may be signs of a technical problem with the battery, they can also be a clue that your phone has been hacked as well, for there is a malicious tool running in the background all the time to spy on all your activities while you use the phone.
2- Unusually High Data Usage
You should constantly monitor the consumption of your internet package, especially if you depend on it regularly while you are outdoors. It is not a problem at home as you will connect via Wi-Fi, but outside the house, you are forced to use the internet package. If you have started noticing a strange spike in data usage compared to what you have been consuming lately, this might be another clue that the phone is monitored or has some virus running in the background. Some malware tries to use your internet package to collect information about you and send it to third parties of hackers. Possibly, all your data could be leaked without you noticing. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor all the applications installed on the phone and check which processes are consuming more data or even Wi-Fi.
3- Annoying ads and applications you didn’t install yourself
Sometimes we install dozens of applications and use them only once or a few times or even none, and then completely forget about them without uninstalling them. It’s not a big deal, but the problem is that amid this chaos of apps, a nasty app might be installed in the background that runs all the time to display annoying ads on the phone. Those annoying ads create a backdoor for hackers to collect more sensitive data about users, such as passwords, email accounts, and various credentials to steal or defraud their identity. Fortunately, Google and Apple are doing everything to eliminate malicious apps. However, if you prefer to install third-party apps, not from the Google Play Store, the risk of infecting your phone with this malware is very high.
4- The phone performance is getting worse
You are the only one who knows the phone’s performance when playing your favorite games or while working on your everyday apps. If you notice that all your apps are operating weirdly and slowing down over time for no apparent reason, this is a sign that viruses are eating up the device’s resources. You will suffer from very slow phone performance, even for the simplest and lightest applications. Viruses always consume phone resources such as RAM and the central processor while working in the background. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor all applications that consume phone resources from the settings, and if you notice any suspicious application, delete it immediately.
5- Websites look different
If your phone contains malicious software, you may be surprised that the Internet sites that you visit often appear strange, and this is 100% conclusive evidence of the presence of viruses on the phone because these viruses act as a proxy server and interrupt your connection between you and the site you are trying to visit and the virus is trying to direct you to a different page.
Your phone doesn’t need to be monitored just to see some of the above signs, but it may be infected with viruses. However, if your phone is clean of viruses and spyware, the problem may be from the heavy programs and games consuming numerous phone resources, which makes you think the phone is slow.
