Mobile phone hacks occur more frequently than you think. According to a study, a hacker steals data every 39 seconds.

Obviously, you don’t want a hacker to access everything you do on your phone without authorization. But it seems like you don’t have a choice. As long as you use a phone that can connect to the internet, you’ll always stand a chance of falling victim to a hack attack.

The first step towards solving any problem is identifying the problem. If you don’t know if your phone is being monitored or not, launching a counter-strategy to ward off the hacker will be out of the question.

In that regard, we can help. Here, we’ll be showing you how to check if your phone is tapped by a hacker without having a cybersecurity degree.

How to Check If Your Phone is Tapped

Trying to learn if someone is trying to spy on you, and why they’re doing that is only natural. After all, you have a right to privacy, even on your digital devices.

If you don’t know where to start with these, you can start by looking out for some of the following warning signs.

1. Sudden Diminished Battery Life

Battery life that diminishes slowly over many years is normal. What isn’t normal is your battery life going down from about six hours after a full charge to three or two.

You’ll notice that playing games or using any demanding app on your smartphone for extended batteries will cause the device to get warm, draining the battery faster.

But what if you experience battery drains without using any app at all?

The problem is obvious; your phone has been running a couple of background processes. Background processes are like apps running without a graphical user interface. They start up in the background, do their stuff in the background, and close.

Many legitimate apps on your phone use background processes. For example, WhatsApp takes advantage of this Android feature to back up your messages without disrupting your usage experience.

Do you know what apps use background processes for extended periods without caring to stop them?

Yes, it’s spyware, designed to collect information about your device usage over the long term. Therefore, any significant decrease in battery endurance is almost a sure sign of something more malicious going on behind the scenes.

2. Performance Issues

Battery drain isn’t the only noticeable change that comes as a result of spyware processes running in the background; your phone will also run slower.

Every task that runs on your phone will use a portion of the processing power, including spyware processes.

Since they exist to snoop on your usage information, you should see a noticeable drop in performance in the day-to-day usage of your phone.

Performance issues, especially when coupled with battery drain are some of the surest warning signs that a third party is tapping your device.

3. Increased Internet Usage

Most updates and backup services on your devices wait for a Wi-Fi connection to avoid unnecessary charges from your mobile network provider.

You should worry when you start to see increased data usage even if you’re not connected to Wi-Fi. You may think, they’ve ruined my battery life and my device’s performance, what do they want with my cellular data, again?

Well, it’s simple. Spying on you through your phone is useless if the data collected doesn’t make its way back to the hacker.

Since the hacker doesn’t have physical access to your phone, there is only one way they can get the information: by sending it using an internet connection.

Since these hackers are so hungry for your data, waiting until you connect to Wi-Fi will be too much of a stretch, so they use cellular data. That’s why an increase in your internet fees could be a sign of a tapped device, especially if it’s accompanied by performance issues and battery drain.

4. Suspicious Messages

This is the most obvious sign that can only be attributed to malware. Seeing undecipherable messages that you didn’t send or expect could mean a lot of things, and none of them is exactly good.

Firstly, the message might be an automatic script that the malware triggered to communicate with its creator. While that sounds somewhat scary, it is actually the best-case scenario.

If you receive messages from friends complaining that you send them randomized emails or texts, it may be the malware trying to spread to everyone in your contact list.

Firstly, you should advise them to avoid clicking any link or downloading any attachments in the message. Then, you should find a credible antivirus package to rid your device of malware.

The takeaway of this is to never ignore messages that look suspicious; they’re almost always a warning sign of malware!

5. Using Specific Codes

There are some codes that you can dial on your Android or iOS smartphone to discover if someone is trying to tap your phone.

There are codes that show if your unanswered calls or messages redirect to another number. Hackers use this method to gather information about their contacts to learn about potential ‘preys.’

Some hackers divert all of your calls or messages regardless of whether you’re on the phone or not. This is a more effective way to achieve the same option, and consequently more destructive.

You can check out some of the anti-hacking codes to confirm your suspicions and take proactive measures to remove the malware from your device.

Conclusion

Once upon a time, only hackers tap phones to collect information from unsuspecting users. Now, even your school and the government are actively trying to monitor your phone.

To proactively prevent any of these from happening, you should know how to check if your phone is tapped.

Fortunately, you don’t need a degree in cybersecurity to do this. By following the steps listed above, you can easily tell if someone is snooping on your activities to get a chance to stop them.