My Android has been hacked. What should I do?

It doesn’t happen very often, but it can happen and does happen. Usually, if your Android phone has been hacked it is because you’ve downloaded some malware from outside the Google Play Store.

Or you picked up some malware from a malware Website. It could be a Trojan virus, some spam, a weird bot that does strange things to your phone, or even something you might not even notice like a key logger.

How To Tell if Your Android Phone Has Been Hacked - Viruses and the approaches used by hackers change all the time, so it is always good to be vigilant. You do have the old classic approaches though, things like pop-ups that tell you your phone might be infected, and these are used to deposit a virus or malware on your phone when you click on them.

How To Fix A Hacked Android Phone - Your first port of call will be to run an antivirus tool on your phone.

If you run the antivirus software and it fixes the problem, great, all you need to do now is restart your phone and be more careful in the future. But if it doesn’t fix the issue, and this can happen from time to time, you will need to factory reset your Android phone.

A factory reset is where you essentially revert the phone back to its original settings – it erases all of your data, apps, and personal files. For this reason, it is important that you have a back-up handy, otherwise you’ll lose a lot of stuff.

Fortunately, most modern Android phones are usually backed up inside Google services like Photos and the Google Play Store. Once you’ve checked that everything is backed up, go to Settings > Backup & Reset > Reset > Factory Data Reset.

A factory reset of your phone is the nuclear option; only do this if your antivirus software has failed to fix the issue. If you do not want to do this, you could always try taking your Android phone to a specialist company that deals with removing malware and viruses from phones.

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