Hacking into Smartphones

Before you read: some questions to help you think about the topic and the words you might need.

What do you know about smartphone hacking?

What stories have you heard?

What words do you know about computer security?

If you own a smartphone, there’s a very good chance a hacker somewhere is trying to turn your world upside down. There are more than one billion smartphones in the world, and the number of smartphones is expected to double by 2015. This will give hackers even more opportunities to steal.

 If you use a smartphone to send important and sensitive information, then you need to stay on top of things because now your phone could be hacked into and your sensitive information taken. A hacker in Seoul is advertising that for 1.5 million won you can get a 2 hour lesson to learn how to hack into a smartphone. The hacker says that he gets five calls a day mostly from middle aged housewives who want to be brought up to speed on what their husbands are up to and from workers in their 20’s to 40’s who want to find out what corruption their bosses could be up to and what promotions are in the pipeline.

If you own a smartphone that relies on the Android platform, then you need to beware because Android is an open-source platform. What this means is that it is also open to being manipulated. This means that someone could get your personal information and clean out your bank account or steal your identity.

Meanwhile, as more consumers make monetary transactions on the go, mobile platforms need to be more secure. As yet we don’t have good security software, so at least some ways we can protect our smartphones is to not open links that look suspicious, and if you’re using an Android based phone then get apps from the Google Playstore as iPhone users have to do with the iTunes store.

Try to guess the meaning of the words in bold and match them with their closest meaning from the choices in the right. Some of the answers are very close and have similar meaning.

 The answers are below the table.