13 Things You Should Be Doing To Protect Your iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at some things you can do on your iPhone to improve security. 

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Now it's always a good idea to look through your iPhone settings and to make changes that could improve your security. Now you don't need to do all of these. Some of them, in fact, you may not want to do depending upon your circumstances. But you definitely want to consider each one carefully to improve your iPhone security. So I find security always start with your passcode. You want to have a good, strong, random passcode. Don't use something that's a date, like your birthday, your kid's birthday, or anything like that. Do something random and definitely longer than 4 characters. A 4 character passcode isn't really worth much. If you go into the Settings App and then you go down to Face ID & Passcode you have to authenticate with your passcode and now if you go down here you can change your passcode. You first have to enter your old passcode and now you can enter your new one. Now here I've already have it set to be six digits. But you can do better than that. Go to Passcode Options. Here you can go with a  4-digit numeric code, which you should never do, or a Custom numeric code which could be longer than 4. Or you could go with a Custom Alpha-Numeric code. Using this means that you can actually type a real password using the keyboard. Of course it makes it harder to get into your iPhone each time you need the passcode. But you'll be much more secure. So you want to ask yourself if security is really important to you. Should you switch to a password rather than a passcode for much stronger security. A good middle ground is to use a passcode with just numbers but make it longer than six digits. 

Now the passcode on your iPhone really isn't worth much unless your Apple ID password is a strong unique random one. So you also want to make sure you've got a good Apple ID password. Also that you're using two-factor with Apple ID. It's pretty much required for lots of functions now on the iPhone and Mac so most people are using it. But if not then you should definitely go with two-factor. That's one of the most important things you could do to protect your security not just on your iPhone but all your online accounts. 

Now there's another passcode in your iPhone. This is one most people don't even know about. If you go into Cellular there is the SIM PIN. So what is the SIM PIN? Well, it's a passcode that's on your SIM card that's given to you by your mobile provider. The little tiny chip that you insert in the phone. It may have been done when you bought the phone. You many never have even looked at it. But technically somebody could actually take that out of your phone, put it in another phone, and then if they could talk to a customer support person at your mobile provider and convince them to give them control of the account they could take control of your phone number and that can create all sorts of havoc. So you may want to consider setting a SIM PIN. You go to set it here. It's going to ask you for your current SIM PIN. Well, you may have never set this before. There are usually default pins that come with different cards. To find out your default pin you are going to have to do a search online for your mobile provider, like AT&T, T- mobile and Verizon, and SIM PIN default and usually that will come up with it. It's usually something like 1111 or 1234. So that's what you want to enter in here. Then you can create your own pin. Make sure that you write that down because you're going to need that if you want to move your SIM card to another phone, which is something you'll probably do when you upgrade your iPhone at some point. So be very sure to record that in Password Manager. Write it down, put it in a drawer, have that SIM PIN and don't loose it. But otherwise you never use that SIM PIN on a day to day basis or anything. 

Now outside of passwords and passcodes the next most important thing you want to do is you want to turn on Find My iPhone to make sure if you loose your iPhone you can not only track it but you can disable it and erase it remotely. So you want to go into your Apple ID iCloud Settings here. You want to go to Find My and you want to make sure Find My iPhone is turned On. If you have it turned off somebody could steal your phone or just find it and they could actually take it over, resell it, maybe even get to the data you have on your phone even with the passcode. But if you have this turned On not only will it help you find a lost iPhone, you may have just misplaced it, but you can erase all data and settings if you are sure it is stolen and then know that not only is your data protected but the thief really can't do much with the iPhone now. It basically won't work for anybody else. 

So when doing a security check on your iPhone one thing you may want to look for is an installed profile. If you go to General Settings in here you're going to see either a listing for Profiles or something like VPN & Device Management. You go in here and now I can see the beta profile for installing beta software. I can also see any VPN profiles that may be installed. Chances are if you have a profile installed it is for VPN software that you, yourself, installed or maybe some corporate software that you're using with your iPhone that could also be for beta software. So in many cases you won't find anything. When you do find something it's usually fine. But if you find a profile listed in here for something you never heard of you may want to do some research to try to figure out what it is. 

 Now I mentioned before that if somebody steals your phone, even if you have a passcode set, they may be able to get into it. Well, there's one really good way to protect yourself from that. If you go down to Face ID or Touch ID & Passcode again there is this setting in here for USB Accessories. If you turn that OFF then whenever your phone is connected to something you're going to have to enter in your passcode to give it access. If you've got USB Accessories turned On then your phone can be connected to something and actually give it access even without the passcode. This allows devices to actually go through and try different passcodes to break into your phone. So make sure that is turned OFF as a general security measure. 

While we're here notice this entire set up here is Allow Access When Locked. You can turn Off what shows up on your Locked screen. So, for instance, you can turn Off Control Center, Siri, ability to reply, returning missed calls. All sorts of things like that. So you may want to just go through and turn all or most of this Off depending upon your needs to limit access to things on your phone while it is locked. 

Now let's talk about WiFi networks. Of course when you're out and about you're connected to the internet through your mobile provider. But when you're near a WiFi network you may want to connect to that and save your mobile bandwidth and use the local WiFi network. However, there's always a bit of a security risk with this. So go into WiFi here and turn Ask To Join Networks Off. That will just ignore any networks that you've never logged in to before. So your home, maybe you are at work, maybe at school the WiFi networks that you've signed into manually before, it will automatically join those. But when you go to the local coffeeshop or to a hotel or something like that it won't just automatically join any network it can find. You still can go in here and then select a network and manually join it. You still can use WiFi networks that you know you trust. It's just not going to do it automatically.

Now another thing you may want to do is use a VPN, a virtual private network. These are apps that you can get in the App Store and usually you pay a subscription fee and then you can use a network that's going to encrypt all of your data as it goes through the WiFi router's at places like coffeeshops, hotels, and conference centers and all of that. This will be an extra layer of protection but it's usually not necessary. Almost all websites are securely protected with encryption so when you go to a website before you go to access data from an app to a server it's going to be encrypted anyway. Email also is going to be encrypted from the Mail app to the server. It's possible to have unencrypted versions of all of these but it's really rare today. But still a lot of people swear by having a VPN just to offer that extra layer of protection.

In addition you could also go into your Apple ID settings. Here you can go to iCloud and use Apple's Private Relay here. Turn that On and that works in a similar way to a VPN to encrypt your data as it goes through untrusted WiFi networks. But you're going to need to be using iCloud+, in other words some paid iCloud Service in order to have this option. 

The next thing you want to do to protect your iPhone is make sure your software is up to date. Apple regularly releases new versions of iOS. App developers release new versions of apps that have security fixes in it. So if you want to go and get it done automatically go to General, then Software Update, and you've got Automatic Updates here and you could have automatically download and installed iOS updates. Back up here at the top level look for App Store. There you can also turn on Automatic App Updates. 

Now one of the most important safety nets you have for dealing with any kind of security issue is a backup. If you loose your iPhone or somebody steals it you're going to want to, of course, disable it and then replace it with a new iPhone. You want to get your data back. So you want to make sure you're using iCloud Backups. Go again into iCloud Settings here, into iCloud, and look for iCloud Backup. This is my demo iPhone so I've got it turned off. But you want to make sure it is turned On. When it is turned On it will tell you the time of the last backup. So it is easy to see it's been backed up in the last 24 hours. If it hasn't been backed up in awhile then you want to investigate and find out why not and get that going. But also keep in mind that by using iCloud for a lot of this other stuff all of your stuff is automatically saved in iCloud. So even if it has been a few hours since the last backup and your phone breaks you still will probably have all of the latest contacts, reminders, notes, calendar events, and all of that because they are automatically saved to iCloud. 

Now here's another security setting you want to look at but you may not want to use. Go back into Face or Touch ID & Passcode. Go all the way to the bottom and there's an option here for Erase Data. This will erase the data if ten failed passcode attempts are tried. So somebody gets ahold of your and thinks they may know your passcode, maybe try your birthday, your kid's birthdays, things like that, once they get past ten it's just going to automatically erase the phone and make it useless. This is a really good security measure. If you want top level security you're going to want to turn this on. However, there are situations where you definitely do not want to turn it on. For instance, if you ever let kids play with your iPhone it would be easy for them to just ignore all the warning messages about this and keep playing with the login screen and then you end up with an erased iPhone. So make sure that if you have this on it's only either you that ever handles the iPhone or somebody else like your spouse that handles your iPhone. You tell them you've turned this on and they understand that if they can't seem to get the passcode right they should stop before they get to ten. 

So there are some ways to make your iPhone more secure. You definitely want to use a strong passcode, a strong password for Apple ID, turn on Find My iPhone, and make sure that you're backing up your iPhone. Other than that look at each one and determine whether or not it's right for you. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.