
Originally Posted by
Issabelle
While we're on the topic of phone safety, I'll share a story from my very close girlfriend that I think is important for girls to hear, especially in our industry where Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/email all syncs and can have security breeches fairly easily.
She had an emotionally controlling and abusive ex-boyfriend she finally kicked out (restraining order, police, court and all). Within a few days, she received a text message from a burner email (smart phones can receive these and this is how many scam 'you won a trip' texts end up on your phone with these weird .com addressed). The email was embedded with a file that didn't show up in the message, but meant the message was an MMS instead of an SMS. Because she was on wi-fi at the time, her phone automatically downloaded the message and the virus. The virus then proceeded to install several programs that logged all her text messages, contact information, emails, passwords (banking info too, since she had her bank app on her phone!) and kept asking for her phone password remotely to get further permissions. Long story short, the cops came and took a look while she was on a separate phone with her service provider. The entire thing linked right back to her crazy ex. By the looks of it, he used the burner email address to send the virus from his phone, which then synched both of their phones one way, meaning he could do everything from go through her phone to remotely turning on the speaker and listening to what she was doing!!!!
I'm sure I haven't gotten the exact technical details of the whole situation my friend was in right, but the basic moral of the story is to go into your phone settings and turn off any settings which automatically download non-SMS texts. Much like you wouldn't open an email if you didn't know who it was from and it had an attachment, you don't want your phone to automatically do something like that for you if someone sends you a text-as-email.
I consider this to be as important for safety as turning of geo-tagging (twitter photos ladies!). On a related note, password protecting your phone is critical, and not just in case it physically falls into the wrong person's hands. In my friend's case, her ex couldn't access a lot of her phone because she had a security pin installed on it and it was blocking him from accessing the phone until she mistakenly inputted the password after the key logger was remotely installed.
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