Australian PM says nightly phone ritual can save you from a lot of headaches

In line with the US National Security Agency’s guidelines, Albanese says that turning your phone off can protect it from cybercriminals. The NSA advises to switch off your phones once every week but the Australian PM goes a step further and says you should turn it off every night for five minutes.

Australia recently appointed Air Marshal Darren Goldie as its first National Cyber Security Coordinator who described the cyber security situation in the country as “dire.” Albanese believes everyone has a part to play when it comes to online safety, hence the advice to not keep your phone on all the time.

Since it’s very hard for hackers to access the core operating system, they often go for in-memory payloads, meaning malicious code is loaded into the memory. These attacks can’t survive a phone reboot.

If you think turning your phone off once every 24 hours is too much work, you can instead turn on the airplane mode or remember to close apps that are running in the background regularly.