Securing Smartphones and Tablets

Cyber criminals look to find and exploit weaknesses in your devices software or the apps that you run. Providers, however, continually provide security fixes to keep your protection in place. If you update to the latest version regularly - the simplest way to do this is to turn on automatic updates - you can immediately improve your security.

Your device is likely to come with several options for you to prevent access to it by others. These include setting up PINS or passwords, pattern swipes and biometric measures such as fingerprint and facial recognition. Choose the one for you that provides the right balance of security and convenience.

Storing all your data on just your device alone means that if it is lost, stolen or hacked you could end up losing it all. You can back up all your data or just the most precious information to another device or to a cloud storage solution so that if the worst happens you can recover it.

Using the same password across multiple applications is a bad idea – if the password for one of these becomes known it could be used to gain access to others. In particular your personal email account is often used to prove who you are when resetting passwords for other services. For this reason it’s important to ensure that the password protecting this is both strong (hard to guess) and unique.

As the length of your chosen password increases so does the difficulty of someone else guessing it. The problem is that complicated passwords full of random numbers, upper and lower case letters and special characters are very difficult to remember. There’s a really simple way to create a very strong password that’s easier to remember. By just joining three random but memorable words together you can create a long password that you can recall. For example ‘cookeryzebratokyo’. You can add a capitalisation, special characters, and numbers if you like to make it even harder to crack or where a system requires them.

You may have noticed that some services you access not only require your password to log in but also send a code to your phone which you enter to prove its you. This is an example of two factor authentication. It means that even if a cybercriminal has your password, they won’t be able to access your account without knowing the code too. It’s a great idea to set this up on the accounts you care about most first such as your personal email account.

Setting up a find my device service will help you control what happens to your data should your device be lost or stolen. If the device is still online you can take actions such as locate its whereabouts on a map, lock the screen, sound an alarm or wipe all the data from it.

Be particularly cautious of downloading apps from links posted in forums and on social media. Instead download them from official app stores such as the App Store (Apple) or Play Store (Android). Even on the official app stores read the reviews and understand the access permissions the app requires to help you make an informed decision on whether you consider it safe to install.

To protect your SIM from being accessed in another device, you can also set up a SIM PIN, more commonly known as a SIM lock. You can do this under the Settings > Security section of your phone.

If you wish to sell on or dispose of your device its really important that you remove your data on the device as it can be retrieved by criminals even if you think you have deleted it.

The first step is to back up all the data copied from your smartphone / tablet to your computer or to cloud storage. You can then follow your phone manufacturers guidance for removing all your data and restore the device to its factory settings.

If you do not intend to sell or give away your device as it is at the end of its life take it to a recognised disposal facility so it can be correctly dismantled and the components recycled.