In 2022 and 2023, the data of tens of millions of Russians leaked onto the network – the leaks affected users of SberSpasibo, Yandex.Food and Delivery Club, SDEK, Gemotest, Tutu.ru, Kwork, Russian Post and d other digital services. According to the Russian service DLBI, which specializes in monitoring the dark web and investigating personal data leaks, in 2022 the data of 3/4 of Russians appeared on the Internet. Now, this data is actively used by scammers. In addition, experts say that special services of different countries may also be interested in it. How to protect yourself and your main gadget – a smartphone in such a situation, read the Russian media material.
Personal data leaks have become a new reality – scammers are coming up with new methods of deception, and some experts believe that all Russians’ personal data is already on the darknet and could have been leaked more than once. According to the director of the Association of Professional Users of Social Networks and Messengers, Vladimir Zykov, it is impossible to completely protect yourself from the fact that personal data can end up on the Web.
“The first thing to understand is that it’s already late, that’s the most important thing. Russia’s greatest resources have been hacked, all the phone numbers that could have been leaked have already been It will no longer be possible to protect your data and privacy, the worst thing has happened more than once: passport data has also been leaked,” Zykov told Russian media.
One option you can try to protect yourself is to change your phone number. “There is no other option now, because there is a high probability that the number has already been leaked somewhere, because now the data on the darknet and other hacker forums walks like snow in winter” , is sure Zykov.
Dmitri Dukhanine / Kommersant
However, a simple change of number will only fix the problem for a while. Buying a “left” SIM card for registration in various services will not save you from scammers, because most often services require not only entering a phone number when registering, but also to perform verification – they text codes or ask you to enter the last digits of the caller’s number for verification.
“You can start to suspect everything and to register just use the left SIM cards for different registrations, but we understand that if you lose the password you probably won’t be able to recover it, because you will not have access to the phone number (unique) Therefore, here it is necessary to understand what a person is – to receive services in a convenient form, then this person acts as a commodity, his data is sold in the market black, or she wants to close herself off from everyone, go somewhere in the forest, enter a reclusive way of life, and only, probably, in this case, no surveillance will be carried out on him, ”said Vladimir Zykov.
Threat in apps
According to Alexey Lukatsky, business security consultant at Positive Technologies, the main source of smartphone security threats are applications that the user installs on his gadget himself – both from official applications, such as the ‘AppStore, Google Play or AppGallery for Huawei products, and not official. stores.
“Often these types of mobile apps contain malicious features that start leaking our personal data to the developers and owners of these apps. Free apps suffer especially because if we’re not buying something, we’re on our own a product, and in this case, our personal data,” Lukatsky said.
To avoid “infection” of the smartphone, the main recommendation is not to install applications that are not necessary for daily activities, as well as carefully read the accompanying information before installation. Attention should be paid to the fact that the program requests access to information or internal components of the smartphone that are not necessary for its operation.
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“We can find out either by viewing the request itself, for example, on the Android platform, when installing a mobile application, we are asked what rights we want to grant to this application. If we talk about the iOS platform, then in the AppStore, when viewing data on a mobile application, it is written what data it has access to, and we can understand whether it is necessary or not. For example, if I install a music application, a video application or a weather application, it hardly needs to access our address book, or our e-mail, or data downloaded from the Internet or, at contrary, pumped to the The Internet. Such signs will allow us to understand whether the mobile app is doing something allowed or forbidden,” Lukatsky explained.
Android or iOS?
Most smartphones today use one of two American technologies – Android and iOS operating systems, explained Vladimir Zykov. According to him, it is not necessary to say that one system is safer than another. The fundamental difference lies only in the degree of openness of the operating system.
“Because the high-level system is an operating system, US intelligence already has access to all of this information. With the Russians, the situation is more complicated, they don’t have access to everything, but just like their American colleagues, they want to have such an opportunity,” is sure Vladimir Zykov.
However, according to Aleksey Lukatsky, iOS can be a more secure system due to its closed nature.
“I consider iOS a bit more secure precisely because it’s more closed and therefore harder for it to develop malware or find vulnerabilities,” Lukatsky explained.
The security of the system is also affected by the strictness of the control of the applications that fall from the official stores. AppStore, according to Lukatsky, is pushing tougher requirements for app developers when checking for malware.
“As for Android, the situation is exactly the opposite. It is an open operating system, anyone can analyze it, find vulnerabilities and develop malicious code to exploit them. Getting apps on Google Play isn’t vetted as seriously as it is with Apple products, so all things being equal, I would call Apple a more secure OS than Android,” Lukatsky says. .
Irina Bujor / Kommersant
Nevertheless, it is impossible to confidently call a more secure operating system, according to Vladimir Zykov. The main difference between Android and iOS is the larger openness of the former.
“But that will change now, they will both become relatively open, as the European Union has passed a Digital Markets Act, which mandates providing access to alternative app stores on the iOS platform, but it “There are still a lot of different nuances. In iOS, there are also various crooks, criminals and all kinds of bad personalities. Practice shows that most of the methods that work on Android also work on iOS in terms of cheating mechanisms,” said explained Vladimir Zykov.
To protect yourself from this kind of “surveillance” by operating systems, according to Vladimir Zykov, you can only refuse to use a smartphone.
“Therefore, if users want to protect themselves, they should buy a push-button phone number and not use modern services. But it’s hard to give something up in the modern world,” he recalled.
How to secure information on the phone?
According to experts, information on the phone itself can be kept safe by observing simple rules of information hygiene. One of its main principles is to securely protect your smartphone with a password. According to Vladimir Zykov, today, when a smartphone is stolen, attackers most often throw away the device itself and try to access banking services via a SIM card.
“I believe that the main tools to protect a smartphone are to update it regularly and to set a strong password to enter the smartphone. It should not be just a four-digit PIN code, but a fairly long password, similar to how we choose passwords to access a computer or to access certain Internet services, social networks, personal mail, etc.,” Lukatsky added.
Another important principle of information hygiene is not to install apps from unverified developers and to verify types of service access on phone apps, Zykov said.
“The second is to carefully examine the messages that come to you in instant messengers, in the mail, etc. Because scammers who engage in phishing, sending viruses, etc., they actively imitate various legal services. There, a person enters his data, login, password, SMS code, these data go to the crooks. Or someone is asked to download something, it can be a virus that will allow crooks to access the content of the whole phone or computer, and that’s even more problematic, because all your photos will automatically go to these people and so on. That is, there is a question of trust in the developers, in the services that a person consumes,” Zykov explained.
Android smartphone owners can also install an antivirus on their phone, which can protect against malicious links and programs. According to Vladimir Zykov, there are two reliable antiviruses in Russia – from Kaspersky Lab and Doctor Web. There is no antivirus for iOS-based smartphones, Lukatsky said, because Apple does not allow antivirus developers access to its platform.
“But in general, I would recommend taking care only of the hygiene of your personal computer, and the advice we usually apply to our laptops or desktops – regular updates, two-factor authentication, strong password – would simply be extended to personal devices. . This will give us protection against 85-90% of all threats likely to affect an ordinary user, ”concluded Alexey Lukatsky.
Experts are convinced that there is no single recipe for securing information on your smartphone. You can minimize the risk by using a set of measures that many already use to protect other devices:
use PIN and PUK codes; if possible, install an antivirus; do not follow unknown links; do not enter your username and password on unknown sites; do not download files from unknown senders; do not use the same passwords on different sites; use two-factor authentication.
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