How To Increase The Security Of Your iPhone
Seeing as security is now top of mind because of the FBI vs. Apple fight, I figured it was time to discuss ways to make your iPhone even more secure. Why should you care about any of this? Simple. A lot of us keep a lot of personal info on our phones. Thus if they fall into the wrong hands and they are not secured properly, that will simply end badly for you. Thus these tips are ones that you should really consider following:
- Use Touch ID: If your iPhone supports fingerprint unlocking which is also known as Touch ID, use it. This will ensure that you not only make your phone more secure, but it also secures purchases from iTunes, the App Store, and other apps. Here’s a link to instructions detailing how to enable Touch ID.
- Use a complex passcode: Most iPhone users are used to using a four digit passcode. The problem with that is it means that the bad guys have 9999 possible passcodes to choose from which means that they can brute force attack the phone by trying different combinations of the passcode until they hit the right one. If you are running iOS 9 or higher, you have the option of using a 6 digit passcode which makes it a lot harder for the bad guys to guess what your passcode is. If you’re really paranoid, you can also use an alphanumeric passcode which is guaranteed to drive the bad guys insane. Here’s a link to help you to set up a passcode to match your paranoia level.
- Set your phone to “self destruct”: Another thing that you can do is to set your phone to erase itself if the passcode is entered wrong 10 times. That way, if your phone is lost or stolen, you can be reasonably sure that if you can’t erase it remotely via iCloud, a bad guy who tries to brute force their way into the phone is going to cause it to erase itself. Go to Settings > Touch ID & Passcode and turn on Erase Data to enable this feature. Needless to say that you should have a backup at all times if you enable this feature. More on backing up your iPhone in a moment.
- Use Find My iPhone: There are two good reasons to use the Find My iPhone beyond being able to find your iPhone. The first is that you can issue an erase command which will wipe the contents of your iPhone if it is stolen. The second it activates Activation Lock which ensures that if your phone is erased in anyway, it cannot be reactivated. Thus making it a high tech paperweight for the bad guys that they can’t resell. Here’s a link to everything that you need to know about Find My iPhone.
- Disable Control Center (and maybe Notifications and Siri too): While it is handy to have Control Center available to say use the flashlight feature without unlocking the phone, bad guys can use it to put the phone into Airplane Mode which takes away your ability to remote erase or track a stolen iPhone. This can easily be disabled by going to Settings > Touch ID & Passcode. While you are there, consider disabling Notifications so that nobody can see who you’ve been messaging, and Siri so that she can’t accidentally give away any of your information.
- Don’t back up your phone to iCloud: One of the things that came out of the FBI vs. Apple fight was that backups to iCloud are not encrypted and are accessible by Apple. That’s a #fail. Thus I would suggest that you should only backup your phone to your PC or Mac and you should encrypt those backups so that nobody but you can restore them. Plus as an added bonus, this method will backup more data than a normal backup would. Specifically, Apple Health Data, WiFi data, website browsing history, and saved passwords. The cool thing is that none of this requires any extra effort to do on your part beyond the initial setup. Here’s a link to a document that will help you to set this up.
Do you have any tips that you’d like to share so that everyone can make sure that their iPhone is as secure as possible? If you do, please post a comment below and share your wisdom. By the way, all of these tips can be used for iPad users as well.
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