Five Ways to Stop Your Mobile Devices From Turning Into a Bot

Android botnets infect thousands of mobile phones and launch DDoS attacks that disrupt multiple industries. While it’s no fun when being at the receiving end of a Denial of Service attack, enterprises are equally right in being concerned about the mobile devices turning into bots. Mobile devices possessed with botnets might blacklist your company’s IP addresses, they could turn initiate DDoS attacks originating from the mobile devices which means that cyberattacks could be triggered from you turf--which is too discomforting, to begin with.

That’s why we bring you five ways to prevent your mobile devices from turning into bots that could wage a war against you.

Raise that cyber wall

Firewall is the integral component of a cybersecurity infrastructure. However, most of the attention is concentrated onto the incoming traffic. Whereas, the outbound traffic hardly gets monitored. Therefore, it is important to keep an eye on your outgoing traffic to identify insider threats.

Users should watch that juice drop

The average mobile user wouldn’t pay much attention to the battery-hogging apps. Nine out of ten times it may be one of the heavy-duty apps that you installed, but the role of a malware can’t be shrugged off entirely. Thus, you should monitor your battery drop and anything unusual recently should raise your suspicion.

Say no to root and jailbreak

The perfect place for a malware to reside and spread is a rooted or a jailbroken smartphone. A responsible user would not be tempted by the ability to customize his/her mobile device. Because an educated user knows that malicious software can creep into the smartphone without his/her notice.

Apps from third-party store -- a strict no

Organizations should take enough care to restrict the users’ access to genuine app stores like Google Play for Android and App Store for iOS. The reason--both the companies have set up a stringent process to kick out apps that imbibe malicious intentions. Although the vetting process is not entirely perfect, it certainly is a lot better than the third-party app stores.

Grant limited permissions

These days, mobile apps are extremely up in demanding permissions for them. However, a lot of security experts have opined that granting excessive permissions to the apps isn’t necessary. Users should enable permissions for only those functions that are helpful to them. Anything extra should be looked at with a suspicious mind.