CometVPN Blog

Key takeaways:

Realizing your phone has been hacked is much more than an inconvenience. From storing pictures of your cat to accessing your bank account and making purchases, we rely on smartphones for almost everything.

The more you use your smartphone, the more important it is to know how to spot, fix, and prevent malware attacks. Most hacks on Android and iOS devices can be reversed, so once you suspect something, it's important to stay calm and take immediate action.

A cybercriminal isn't always a loner writing code in his mom's basement. Often, malicious software is created by multimillion-dollar corporations with their own LinkedIn profiles and Wikipedia pages.

Such is the NSO Group, the developers of the notorious Pegasus spyware. This software can extract a wealth of data from the victim's smartphone - conversations, chats, photos, geo-location, without them even falling for a phishing attack.

The company positions itself as fighting terrorism but has been listed as a threat to the US, and, reportedly, Pegasus spyware was used against journalists and activists. The lines between proper and improper spyware are becoming blurry. What can we do to avoid it being used against us?

An international law enforcement team has successfully arrested hundreds of criminals and seized their illegal assets. All thanks to an allegedly encrypted messaging app with data collection backdoors for the FBI.

That's where the name FBI honeypot comes from. But while effective in catching criminals, honeypots raise important privacy and security concerns.

After such a precedent is set, how can anyone be sure he isn't falling for a honey trap even without any criminal intentions?

We’re all familiar with the pain of sudden internet connection problems, instability, and the constant website crashes. And while this could just be an innocent connection loss, it could also be a sign of an IP fragmentation attack.

Although a lesser-known threat, it’s a type of cyber attack that exploits the way internet protocols handle data transmission to evade firewalls, disrupt services, and infiltrate networks undetected.

If successful, a slowed internet would be the least of your worries – there would also be a risk of major application crashes, and worst still, malicious and unauthorized data breaches. That’s why it’s important to be informed and know how to protect your device properly.

Screen hacking is a new type of attack that injects fake touchpoints on a touchscreen by using electromagnetic interference EMI. A hacked screen can be used to perform any action on the device, including opening browsers, sending messages, or installing software.

Hackers use dedicated devices to send signals to your touchscreen that mimic the same signal sent when the screen is being touched. Luckily, it’s currently impossible to do that from a long distance, so the person has to be within a few meters of you, making it easier to understand what’s going on.

Password entropy is a key concept for creating a strong password. Expressed in bits of entropy, it gives us an objective measurement of how difficult it is to crack, guess, or brute-force attack passwords.

We all know that strong passwords must be complex and include lots of special characters, numbers, lowercase, and uppercase letters. Understanding what password entropy is and how to calculate it helps create strong passwords you can remember but criminals struggle to crack.