gaurav200x
Gaurav Mittal
Cell phones are everywhere and I believe they are here to stay. With the advent of cellular phones for public use came a whole host of issues that I don’t think anyone expected, at least not in the magnitude we are seeing today. There are two kinds of cell phone safety and then there is cell phone etiquette. There is practical cell phone safety, which addresses the safest ways for you to use your cell, and etiquette plays a huge part in this. The other safety concern is that there are some health risks to those who use cellular phones.
Cell phones and driving are a big controversy. As a matter of fact many states in the United States are contemplating enacting legislation that would ban the use of cell phones in a car. While I think something has to be done about using cell phones while driving, I don’t think it is a practical idea to ban their use altogether in vehicles. I don’t know how it would be monitored except to develop technology that would block all numbers while driving except emergency numbers. Until such a thing occurs or people start refraining as much as possible from using a cell phone in their cars we must be extra careful on the road.
Cell phones are more vulnerable than regular phones due to two dangers: eavesdroppers can listen in on your calls, and thieves can bill their own calls to your account.
The best protection? Be aware of what you discuss on your cell phone. Remember that it acts as a handheld broadcast station. Don’t give out your credit card number or other sensitive or confidential information; don’t say anything you wouldn’t say on broadcast radio or TV.
Fraudulent billing: It is possible for thieves to intercept a cell phone signal and clone the phone’s ID numbers (its Electronic Serial Number and Mobile Identification Number, or ESN/MIN). The result is the equivalent of a stolen calling card. Some simple countermeasures include:
Limit “roaming”: Review which phones have roaming enabled and limit these as much as practical. Roaming usually defeats the use of Personal Identification Numbers (PINs). Cloners prefer roaming phones for this reason and they target airport parking lots, airport access roads, and rural interstates. Roaming also makes it more difficult for some cellular carriers to use fraud-detection programs to monitor an account and shut it down when fraud is detected.
Turn the phone off. Cell phones poll the cellular base station with the strongest signal every few second. This is how the system knows which base station to route calls through. However, this polling exposes the phone to interception and cloning.
Review all bills and report every erroneous call to the service provider. There are two types of cloning:
Outright theft of the phone’s ESN/MIN is most common. A bill will reflect hundreds, even thousands of bogus calls.
The other type of cloning is called tumbling, where a cloned phone uses a different ESN/MIN for each call. A bill might have only one bogus call this month, none next month, but three calls the month after that. The phone has still been cloned and fraud is occurring.
Another danger to your cell phone is that it may get stolen and the mobile companies take no step to prevent it as generally they take 24 months charges from you before hand and if your cell phone gets stolen then you definitely have to take a new plan and buy a new hand set which is profit for them. You cannot prevent your handset from stealing but you can always get a fifteen-digit code of your cell phone by typing in star-hash-zero-six-hash (* # 0 6 #) and the code will appear on your screen. This is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it safe. And when your phone gets stolen you can give this code to your service provider and they will be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the sim card the phone would be useless and the thief would not be able to sell it even.
There are number of other reasons also that why your phone needs to be secure specially if it is bluetooth enabled then one has to be pretty careful as the danger increases with viruses and different hacking systems. There are loads of viruses coming in which can help your phone in malfunctioning. The protection from these is not accepting unknown messages through bluetooth and installing a good ant virus software in your cell phone but this is not just all if ever your phone is hacked then it may become impossible for you to save your personal information it would be best on your part if you don’t keep your personal and confidential information in your cell phones.
Now these were the internal dangers but u also needs to protect the exterior of your cell phone. You have to protect it from scratches and other damages. The best way is to get a plastic cover so even if there are scratches you can change the cover the other way is to buy a puffed up soft mobile cover so that there is no issue of scratches and even if it slips out of your hands you it doesn’t get hit really badly and does not break at joints. And one thing more to be taken care of is that u keep your cell phone in such a place where there are minimum chances of it to fall. And by taking proper care you can safe keep your self and your cell phone.
Cell phones and driving are a big controversy. As a matter of fact many states in the United States are contemplating enacting legislation that would ban the use of cell phones in a car. While I think something has to be done about using cell phones while driving, I don’t think it is a practical idea to ban their use altogether in vehicles. I don’t know how it would be monitored except to develop technology that would block all numbers while driving except emergency numbers. Until such a thing occurs or people start refraining as much as possible from using a cell phone in their cars we must be extra careful on the road.
Cell phones are more vulnerable than regular phones due to two dangers: eavesdroppers can listen in on your calls, and thieves can bill their own calls to your account.
The best protection? Be aware of what you discuss on your cell phone. Remember that it acts as a handheld broadcast station. Don’t give out your credit card number or other sensitive or confidential information; don’t say anything you wouldn’t say on broadcast radio or TV.
Fraudulent billing: It is possible for thieves to intercept a cell phone signal and clone the phone’s ID numbers (its Electronic Serial Number and Mobile Identification Number, or ESN/MIN). The result is the equivalent of a stolen calling card. Some simple countermeasures include:
Limit “roaming”: Review which phones have roaming enabled and limit these as much as practical. Roaming usually defeats the use of Personal Identification Numbers (PINs). Cloners prefer roaming phones for this reason and they target airport parking lots, airport access roads, and rural interstates. Roaming also makes it more difficult for some cellular carriers to use fraud-detection programs to monitor an account and shut it down when fraud is detected.
Turn the phone off. Cell phones poll the cellular base station with the strongest signal every few second. This is how the system knows which base station to route calls through. However, this polling exposes the phone to interception and cloning.
Review all bills and report every erroneous call to the service provider. There are two types of cloning:
Outright theft of the phone’s ESN/MIN is most common. A bill will reflect hundreds, even thousands of bogus calls.
The other type of cloning is called tumbling, where a cloned phone uses a different ESN/MIN for each call. A bill might have only one bogus call this month, none next month, but three calls the month after that. The phone has still been cloned and fraud is occurring.
Another danger to your cell phone is that it may get stolen and the mobile companies take no step to prevent it as generally they take 24 months charges from you before hand and if your cell phone gets stolen then you definitely have to take a new plan and buy a new hand set which is profit for them. You cannot prevent your handset from stealing but you can always get a fifteen-digit code of your cell phone by typing in star-hash-zero-six-hash (* # 0 6 #) and the code will appear on your screen. This is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it safe. And when your phone gets stolen you can give this code to your service provider and they will be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the sim card the phone would be useless and the thief would not be able to sell it even.
There are number of other reasons also that why your phone needs to be secure specially if it is bluetooth enabled then one has to be pretty careful as the danger increases with viruses and different hacking systems. There are loads of viruses coming in which can help your phone in malfunctioning. The protection from these is not accepting unknown messages through bluetooth and installing a good ant virus software in your cell phone but this is not just all if ever your phone is hacked then it may become impossible for you to save your personal information it would be best on your part if you don’t keep your personal and confidential information in your cell phones.
Now these were the internal dangers but u also needs to protect the exterior of your cell phone. You have to protect it from scratches and other damages. The best way is to get a plastic cover so even if there are scratches you can change the cover the other way is to buy a puffed up soft mobile cover so that there is no issue of scratches and even if it slips out of your hands you it doesn’t get hit really badly and does not break at joints. And one thing more to be taken care of is that u keep your cell phone in such a place where there are minimum chances of it to fall. And by taking proper care you can safe keep your self and your cell phone.