As a preventative step against potential cyberattacks, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recommended that the country’s citizens power off and then restart their mobile devices once per day. Tech gurus concur with this recommendation.
As Albanese announced the appointment of Australia’s first national cybersecurity coordinator, he stated that the nation needs to take preventative measures to protect itself from potential cyberattacks.
“Everyone is accountable for their actions. Simple things, like making sure you turn off your phone every night for at least five minutes. For everybody who is watching this, you should do that once per 24 hours, preferably when you’re doing something else, like cleaning your teeth.
The advice offered by the Australian government is not novel. The National Security Agency of the United States produced best-practice guidelines for mobile device security in the year 2020. One of these rules recommended restarting mobile devices once a week to protect them from being hacked.
The experts feel that doing a daily restart, despite the fact that it may appear like a basic precaution, can be helpful in some circumstances.
He stated that restarting a phone on a regular basis might potentially reduce danger because it would forcibly stop any programs and processes that were operating in the background and had the potential to be monitoring users or collecting data for nefarious purposes.
According to Nanda, many consumers are unaware that their applications are frequently operating in the background.
“Given how much we use our smartphones in our daily lives, we’ve heard of cases where people haven’t turned off their phones in an entire year,” Nanda added, saying that those who rely on their phone’s alarm clock, for example, may need it on 24 hours a day. “Given how much we use our smartphones in our daily lives, we’ve heard of cases where people haven’t turned off their phones in an entire year.”
According to Nanda, some of the benefits of restarting a phone could be attained by routinely dismissing any applications that could be running in the background. However, there is a possibility that a compromised smartphone is running further malicious processes, and the only way to terminate these activities is to power off the phone.
“Turning off the phone, if there’s a process going from the hostile side, breaks the chain. Even if it’s only for the period the phone is off, it undoubtedly annoys the potential hacker.
According to Nanda, “It may not fully protect you, but [rebooting] can make things more difficult” for hackers to accomplish their goals.
While specialists agree that performing routine system restarts is a good idea, they have also pointed out in the past that this tactic is unlikely to discourage committed hackers from focusing their attention on a particular person. This is especially true in light of the proliferation of sophisticated technologies that have been used to attack world leaders in recent years.
According to Dr Arash Shaghaghi, a senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of New South Wales, unplugging from the internet every day is a smart first step to “encourage users to adopt good cyber hygiene” because it can minimize certain hazards.
On the other hand, Shaghaghi cautioned against having a phoney sense of safety.
“If someone steals your password and you turn off two-factor authentication on your phone, you are not protected, and the security of your account is not improved. If attackers are targeting a device, a momentary disconnect can be little more than a nuisance for them, as he explained.
Even after the phone is turned off, certain parts of it may continue to function.
According to Shaghaghi, in the case of so-called zero click exploits, which are sophisticated attacks that don’t involve an action from a user to grant an adversary access, restarting a smartphone “may challenge the attackers as they may need to find alternative means to exploit the device once powered back on.”
According to Shaghagi, the privacy of smartphone users might be compromised by apps that secretly track their locations and listen in on their conversations. According to him, another essential step toward ensuring online safety is for users to exercise caution regarding the software they install and the permissions they allow.
