6 Ways to Keep Your Mobile Phone Secure

Your smartphone is your constant companion, allowing you to conveniently keep in touch with family and friends, shop, bank, order takeout, and listen to your favorite music. The last thing you want is to lose the information you have stored on your smartphone — or worse, get hacked. Follow these six tips to keep your mobile phone secure.

1. Use a Strong Password, Touch ID, or Face ID

Controlling access to your smartphone is an essential part of protecting data. Make it harder for cyber thieves to open your phone by setting up a long, complex password — or by using a fingerprint or facial recognition system — for unlocking your phone.

For a secure mobile phone, your passcode should be at least six digits (preferably 12). A unique combination of letters, numbers, and symbols is ideal. If you have an iPhone, be sure to enable its advanced data protection feature, which uses end-to-end encryption to secure the majority of your iCloud data, ensuring that even Apple cannot access it, and requires setting up alternative recovery methods for data retrieval in the event of account loss.1 In other words, it's a super-strong lock on your online data that requires you set up special ways to get your data back if you ever forget your password.

2. Keep Your Operating System Updated

Periodically your mobile phone company will create updates to its operating system (OS) to improve performance and fix any new security issues. If you want a secure smartphone, pay attention to these notification updates. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency offers an comprehensive overview and useful guidelines for installing OS updates.

For instance, you should install them only when prompted from trusted a vendor website (not from a link in an email), and do so only when on a trusted network location like at home or work.2

3. Back Up Your Data Regularly

Thieves and hackers aren't the only threat to your mobile phone's security. You also risk losing data if you don't have a backup system in place.

With an iPhone, you can either back up data to your computer using iTunes or back it up to the cloud using iCloud. The main drawback to computer backup versus iCloud backup is that you can lose the data if your computer crashes.3

Apple provides 5 gigabytes of free iCloud storage space for each of its devices,4 and you can purchase additional space if needed. If you have a huge amount of data — lots of images, music, apps, and the like — the iTunes computer backup route is probably your most affordable option.5

If you have an Android phone and signed up with your Google account when you first powered up, your device is equipped with Google's automatic backup system. Check the “Backup & Reset" or "Backup and Restore" section of your system settings to make sure the system is running and backing up data to your Google account.