We store a lot of data on our mobile phones including our family and ‘private’ pictures and leave no stone unturned to prevent them from evil eyes.

But no matter how cautious you are, someone can snag your photos with a little effort and access to your public information.

Here’s how one can hack your phone and steal the pictures.

Cloud Storage:

Cloud Storages like Google Drive lets you store and transfer the pictures and other files and share them across other devices.

While all the cloud services promise to ensure the safety of your data, many of them are vulnerable to attacks.

There are several examples in which hackers contacted cloud support, requested for a password reset by answering some security questions using their targets’ information gathered from their social media accounts and remotely wiped all of their data.

Email:

Almost everyone uses the Email application on the mobile device to send and receive files. While remotely breaking into someone’s device and getting access to pictures and other data is very difficult, it is much easier to hack an email account.

With an email address in hand, a hacker can try different password combinations to break into it. Otherwise, if the hacker gets some basic information about you through your social media accounts or other sources, he or she can use forget password option and answer security questions to set a new password.

While by accessing your email, the hacker may not get the pictures directly but can collect other sensitive information which could help him/her in hacking your phone. An example of such information is billing, particularly the cell phone bills.

Days of paper billing are long gone and most of the people today prefer to receive and pay their bills online.

The cell phone bills not only contain the number of the holder but also a bundle of other information such as details of incoming and outgoing calls. By utilizing this information, the hacker can hack your phone to steal your pictures.

Cellular Company:

Your cellular provider may also make your phone venerable to the attacks. Some companies allow you to set your user ID as your wireless number.

If a hacker has your number, he/she can use the “forgot my password” to request a new password. All he/she needs to the do for this is to answer a few security questions.

Various study reports have shown that the many people use terrible PINs, with “1234” being the most common one. Some people set their birthday as their 4-digit unlock-code while some others use their vehicle number for this purpose.

So if your PIN code is easily guessable, the hacker can break into your account and get access to your data you sent or received on your phone during the recent billing period.

Spoofing:

If a hacker has managed to access the numbers you have contacted from your phone or the text messages you’ve sent, it isn’t too difficult for him/her to spoof your number.

In this way, the hacker has no need to hack your phone to steal photos and he/she can trap you to send them directly to him/her. There are many Caller ID apps and cell phone spoofs out there with the help of which the hackers can appear in your contacts posing as someone else.

So, What I Should Do?

Apart from the abovementioned methods, there are many other ways through which the hackers can steal your pictures and other data.

What you need to do to make your data secure is to use strong passwords on your cloud service, email accounts and avoid giving away much information about yourself on social media platforms.