How hackers can remotely access your Mobile phone

How hackers can remotely access your Mobile phone

Do you know that all Mobile devices have MAC address?

Media Access Control (MAC) address of a device is a unique identifier assigned to a network interface controller. For communications within a network segment, it is used as a network address for most IEEE 802 network technologies, including Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

When a hacker wants to hack into your mobile device, all he needs to know is your Phone’s MAC address.

You asked: How will he know the MAC address of my phone when he doesn’t have access to my phone?

There is always a documented repository of MAC of all manufactured network equipment, Hackers have ways to find MAC addresses of these equipment using special software.

Once you are connected to the internet, your mobile device is assigned a specific IP address at the time of connection, and this is then linked to your mobile phone MAC address.

How a hacker launches his attack?

1. He pings (arp -a) the MAC address of your Mobile device to know your mobile device IP address.

2. He pings (ping) your IP address to find out if you are online. If your device is online, it will send an acknowledgement, (Syn Ack) back to the hacker.

3. He scans the ports on your device to determine which ports are open and running; this helps him to knows the services that are running on your devices.

Services are simply the various applications running on your device. Please note, applications run on port numbers.

4. He scans any open port on your device and looks for a service of his interest. Example, your stored Bank details on a wallet application running on certain port number, your email password and other login credentials stored on a Notepad application file in the device storage.

5. He checks for vulnerability, and he is ready for exploit.

Please note, a vulnerability is a weakness which can be exploited by a threat actor, such as an attacker, to perform unauthorized actions within a computer system.

You ask: How then do I secure my mobile device from hacking?

MY RESPONSE:

1. Maintain 100 physical security of your mobile device

2. Regularly apply operating system upgrade to patch “discovered” vulnerabilities

3. Update your apps periodically

4. Install premium anti-malware software and endeavour to update its threat signature regularly.

5. Install a premium proxy and VPN software on your mobile device

6 And finally, avail yourself of information about emerging threat and how to avoid them.

Destiny Young is a Cloud/Cybersecurity Engineer, writes from Abuja