How to tell if your iPhone has been hacked

If you're not careful while using your smartphone, it can happen that a hacker gets hold of it. Here's how to tell if your iPhone is compromised

Although Apple calls its iOS mobile operating system "inherently secure," the truth is that even iPhones can fall victim to hacking attacks that, especially through a malware infection, can lead to finding yourself with a hacked iPhone in your hand.

The methods for hacking an iPhone, all things considered, are the same as those used to attack an Android smartphone: phishing emails with links or attachments that infect the device, "man in the middle" attacks, often via a backdoor, or simply the good old infected app. Once a hacker has "entered" a user's iPhone, he can do almost anything he wants with it and, if he's good, it's very difficult for the phone's owner to notice anytime soon: the symptoms are there, but if you don't go looking for them, you'll only notice them after some time. Here are what are the most obvious of these symptoms, which can help us understand if the iPhone has been hacked.

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Amnormal battery consumption

In a compromised iPhone, the hardware has to handle two types of requests: those of the user, which can be seen, and those sent remotely by the hacker (or caused by the malware used to infect the smartphone), which cannot be seen. Both, however, impact the battery. So if we don't usually make very heavy use of the iPhone but, from one day to the next, the battery lasts much less there might be something wrong. By going to iPhone battery settings, then, we can check which apps or services are consuming more energy: if most of the energy is used by background services, then it's not a good sign.

Amnormal consumption of phone plan

Infected smartphones are often used to spread viruses to other devices. Usually by sending SMS messages. Checking the list of outgoing messages, therefore, is something that should be done often. If we receive charges for unsent messages (or, even worse, if we have hundreds of free SMS at our disposal but have run out of them), it means that our iPhone is sending infected messages without our knowledge. Other viruses, on the other hand, make secret phone calls to paid numbers or activate subscription services without our knowledge.

Amnormal performance crash

To do all this, a hacker or a virus consumes not only energy, but also CPU power and RAM memory. And so the activity of checking our Apple smartphone has a negative impact on the performance of the device. Sometimes this impact is so high that it can be noticed "with the naked eye", other times the hacker is smarter and avoids being discovered because of too much activity. Still, it's always better to go into the settings every now and then and check the usage time: not only to see if there's excessive hardware resource consumption, but also to know which app or service is causing it.