Australia’s prime minister says you can protect your personal data by doing this to your phone daily

By Nick Heyman On Jun 26, 2023

Repeating advice from cybersecurity experts, the prime minister of Australia says that smartphone owners should turn off their phones for at least five minutes every day. There is actually a sound reason for doing this. By shutting down your phone, any spyware running in the background on your device will stop. By turning off your handset, you are shutting down any background processes and giving you and the device some protection against malware.

According to The Guardian, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese said that Australians need to be proactive. “We need to mobilize the private sector, we need to mobilize, as well, consumers,” Albanese said while introducing the country’s first national cybersecurity coordinator. “We all have a responsibility. Simple things, turn your phone off every night for five minutes. For people watching this, do that every 24 hours, do it while you’re brushing your teeth or whatever you’re doing.”

The U.S. National Security Agency guidelines for mobile device security suggest that consumers reboot their smartphones once a week to prevent hacking. Dr Priyadarsi Nanda is a senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney where he specializes in cybersecurity. He says that by rebooting a phone on a regular basis, applications and processes running in the background are forcibly closed preventing them from collecting data or monitoring users.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suggests smartphone users should turn their phones off for 5 minutes each day

Dr. Nanda said, “Given how much we use smartphones in our lives, we know of cases where people haven’t turned their phones off in an entire year.” Some people rely on their phone’s alarm clock and leave the device on 24 hours a day. He says that while some of the benefits of rebooting a phone can be achieved by closing an app that might be running in the background, other operations running in the background of a compromised phone can only be stopped by turning it off.

The cybersecurity specialist stated, “If there’s a process running from the adversarial side, turning off the phone breaks the chain, even if it’s only for the time the phone is off, it certainly frustrates the potential hacker. It may not fully protect you, but [rebooting] can make things more difficult.”

Other cybersecurity lecturers agree such as Dr Arash Shaghaghi, who talks about the subject at the University of New South Wales. Dr. Shaghaghi says that rebooting a phone daily is a good way to “encourage users to adopt good cyber hygiene.” But he warns that “If your password is stolen and you disconnect your phone, you are not protected, and your account is still at risk. If attackers target a device, a temporary disconnect may be only an inconvenience for attackers. Rebooting your device regularly helps when your device is not compromised with persistent malware, as can turning on airplane mode.”

Maybe you should make it a habit to turn your phone off for five minutes a day.

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