How to hack-proof your life

We round up the very best hacks to protect your phone, which, let's face it, pretty much holds a lot of your life in its hands/buttons.

Think about how tidy you keep your home for a second. You store away your jewellery, you burrow your bills somewhere safe and you still have a secret stash of money for those impulsive buys that are practically free because you didn’t even remember you had that money in the first place. Sound familiar? Well, now ask yourself if you do the same for your phone. It’s called ‘cyber hygiene,’ the maintenance of your online life and you need to start thinking about how to hack-proof it because phones aren’t impenetrable.

Google found this out the hard way when their new Pixel Phone – the phone set to rival Apple iPhone’s popularity – was hacked in under a minute. In all fairness, it was by a Chinese security team but still; the point was proven.

Aside from selfies and life-changing weather/outfit/organisation apps, our phones also store a lot of our financial and personal information. We’re all guilty of using it to online bank or to e-mail over personal data so that's why you need to know how to hack-proof your phone…

Encrypt your phone

This basically means concealing your data using codes so that people who aren’t you can’t understand it, and you can do it by going into your security settings and switching it on.

Make it harder to get into

Using a six-digit pin is much more difficult to guess right than a four-digit one – and as it’s ‘non-physical knowledge’ (unlike your fingerprint which is stored out there in the world wide web,) only you will have access to it. You can also switch on a ‘self-destruct’ mode so that your phone will completely wipe itself after a certain number of failed attempts. If your phone doesn’t have this option, check out ‘Locker’ app.

Use encrypted messaging apps

Whatsapp have now encrypted messages with end-to-end technology so that your conversations stay private between those involved, locking out any nosy hackers. So, for any semi-personal conversations, this messaging app is the way to go.

Update your software

And, as annoying as they can be, software updates really are your friend as they often fix bugs that can allow hackers into your device so stop stalling and get updating.

Remove all viruses

USB device FixMeStick removes viruses and malware from your PC or MAC that some anti-virus programmes often miss. It works while your machine is off, constantly downloading latest virus updates and detecting any clever hackers trying to get into your machine.