How to know you are spied on?

If yesterday common sense was the most shared thing in the world, today that seems to have changed, or at least in the process. Spy has grown to unbelievable proportions and many endpoint users including phones, tablets and computers are spied on on a daily basis most often and unfortunately without their knowledge. Greed having taken precedence over common sense there is even talk of the boom in economic spy, because now information carefully called data is considered a capital gold in all fields, the gold of the century. And for that, states spy on states, companies spy on their competitors, individuals and even groups of often ill-intentioned individuals are all day long looking for ways and means to subtly introduce themselves into others data, "the gold of the century", in short everyone or almost everyone spies on everyone, no one is really safe except the one who continues to believe naively that he is. There is even reputable software in the field like PEGASUS, the israeli software at the heart of the scandals today. Considering the disturbing proportions of spy around the world, a question arises: what are the different means by which spies operate and how do you realize that you are a victim?

The strongest today is the one with the information often called the "data" and not the one with the impressive military arsenal. The fight between states is tough, however we are not going to venture into that area in this article.

Spy is defined as an activity aimed at collecting information or secret intelligence on behalf of a country, a company or a person according to the UNIVERSALIS dictionary. Although this mostly illegal activity does not date from today, the means of action have had to evolve over time although some old methods or modus operandi remain.

According to a 2019 study by mobile security expert AdaptiveMobile Security, more than 1 billion phones have already been victims of what is known as Simjacker or the art of tracking your phone or even sim attack. This is because this hacking method targets SIM cards and involves sending a message to the target device. If the message is opened and clicked, hackers can spy on the hacked device and even discover its location.

Nowadays this method has evolved. It is no longer the hard-to-reach Sim who is the target, but rather we send you an image or an attachment by email or any social network, just click on the image and open it and there That's it. The hacker now has access to your phone, computer or tablet.

Another way for the spies to get you is the Trojan horse. Indeed, it is a type of virus which is attached to certain applications and once they are downloaded, you thus have this Trojan horse whose objective is to allow the instigator (spy) to have access to your data on the terminal that was used to make the download. For information, in 2019, this type of virus was found in the Camscanner application which was downloaded during the same period over 100 million times from playstore. This reflects the number of people who are somehow the victim of their information being hacked without knowing it.

The purpose of this article is by no means to panic you but to make you aware of the existence of such a phenomenon which concerns everyone and which is hardly or rarely talked about.

There is reason to wonder how to find shelter. But before we get to that, there's another question we'll answer first: How do you know you're not being spied on?

To find out, there are a series of checks to do which are:

Your settings have changed i.e. the wallpaper for example among others
Is there a new application that appears in the list of applications installed on your terminal
Your data consumption has increased and check to see the application or applications that consume more data, the applications running in the background of your phone
At the account level, is there a new account added to yours that did not exist
There are new ads showing on your phone that weren't showing before. [At this point, a little patience because it could be the advertisements from a new application that you have installed and therefore be sure to check this first].
If you see any of these signs on your phone, you might think their phone is being spied on.

And now what to do to put an end to this intrusion? This is the question we will answer in the next article in the days to come.