Mobile phones have become a practically essential tool for many people around the world: we use them to communicate with our loved ones, to work, to access our email accounts and bank accounts, among other uses. That is why Mobile phones have also become a target for cybercriminals.
Smartphones have security measures in place to try to prevent users from falling victim to hackers, but these aren’t foolproof, especially since cybercriminals usually trick their victims into falling into their trap by tricking them into installing malware or other malicious software. Turning off your mobile phone can help protect us, at least to some extent, and that’s why experts recommend it.
Why you should restart your phone every day: It can improve your phone’s security and performance
By experts, we mean various international government agencies. The US National Security Agency (NSA) recommends turning off your cell phone for about five minutes at least once a week. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who was appointed as his country’s national cybersecurity coordinator, goes further: we should turn off the cell phone for five minutes every day.
The Australian Prime Minister mentioned, in statements reported by The Guardian, that it is everyone’s responsibility to help protect themselves: “We are all responsible, we can do simple things like turn off your phone every night for five minutes. Do it every 24 hours, do it whenever you feel like it, brush your teeth or whatever.
We must keep in mind that this is not a magic solution, but it can help. The idea of turning off your cell phone every night is mainly that By disabling it, we force all processes to closeincluding those in the background and any malicious attempts to hack the mobile or extract data from it, or attempts by a hacker to download or upload data from the mobile after having intervened in it.
Turning off or restarting the mobile forces the closure of all processes, including background ones and possible attempts to hack the device. However, the phone already contains malware, disabling it will not eliminate it.
However, If the phone has already been infected with some type of malware, turning it off will not make it go away. To do this, we will have to perform more specific and complicated measures, probably with the help of a technician, if you do not have the necessary knowledge to remove malware from your device. Turning off your phone every night does not help much, but it helps and can also contribute to creating a routine and greater awareness regarding the security of our devices and data.
Last but not least, Turning off your phone also improves its performanceespecially during very hot seasons. Some manufacturers even recommend an occasional reboot of the devices to, again, close all processes and give a new lease of life to the device. Rebooting the phone can consume more battery, since the process of rebooting the entire system consumes energy, but it will also give a fresh air to the device, thus helping to improve its performance, a cost that seems reasonable.
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