“Free iPhone downloads” is a term often used by cyber criminals to attract iPhone owners to download their malicious software, unknowing of the harm it can cause. Any iPhone user should be very wary of advertisements promising “free iPhone downloads” as more often than not they are not approved by Apple for use on the iPhone – and for good reason.

The Trojan Horse

One of the most famous myths in the world is the story of the Trojan War. The seemingly invincible city of Try looked like it was going to survive an extremely long battle with Greece. One day, there was monstrously large wooden horse sitting outside the city walls. A horse was thought to be a symbol of Troy and considered a sign of favour from the goddess, Athena. They took the massive wooden horse inside the walls to offer to the Goddess Athena in thanks. But inside the wooden horse were the best of Greece’s soldiers. When Try was sleeping, they came out of the belly of the Trojan horse and ransacked the city. This story is the reason discrete viruses are known as “Trojans” – they masquerade as free gifts, software or smiley faces and appear to be totally innocent. Often they contain malware, spyware or viruses and other nasties that capture your personal information, credit card details, keystrokes and private data and send it to cyber criminals.

Be Safety Conscious

Malware refers to a wide range of programs that negatively affect your computer or iPhone. They can do a variety of things to your iPhone, sometimes even infecting it so badly the only way to fix it is to erase all your personal data and restore it to its brand new settings.

The most obvious sign of an infected iPhone is that it begins to behave unpredictably or runs extremely slow. If that happens, you need to find virus-scanning software to run over your iPhone and detect any errors. Don’t just rely on the security program on your computer to find and fix any viruses. Often virus scanners can be out of date, even by a few days.

However, there are ways you can avoid running into security breaches on your iPhone. Avoid opening emails from unknown addresses, especially spam. Use only email address with spam filters and never open anything marked as spam unless you are entirely sure you know the sender. Virus scan all email attachments before opening, even if you know the sender as they may have a virus they are not aware of yet. You should also never click on links from popup advertisements that advertise free iPhone downloads as these are often a blatant trap.

These few tips can greatly minimise the risk of running into a virus on your iPhone. Keeping your virus scanner up to date and only browsing safe websites are the other main ways of ensuring your phone and your private data remains safe and secure and out of the reach of cyber criminals.

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And because the iPhone lets you browse the full internet – not just a modified mobile version, you can encounter the same problems and risks of contracting a virus on the iPhone as you can with your PC.

However, like browsing on a PC, there are various things you can do to minimise the risk you run and impact these sites have on your browsing experience.

For a start, blocking pop-up windows is simple by just enabling or disabling Safari’s in-built pop up blocker in the Settings menu. There are also options for disabling or enabling JavaScript and Plug-Ins, as well as the ability to restrict Cookies.

When using these security options, it is wise to remember that for every bad function out to capture your personal data, there are plenty of good programs and sites that require access to these features. For example, switching off JavaScript may restrict your ability to use sites like Facebook, MySpace or Google Docs.

When it comes to Cookies, which are small data files used to identify your browser, the story is much the same. Turning Cookies off will mean you cannot do internet banking or online shopping, but it will stop an online advertiser tracking your browsing history.

Rather than turning Cookies off completely, it’s probably safest to set your iPhone to only accept Cookies from sites you’ve visited. This means that only the sites you actually load on your iPhone will set Cookies and no one else can.

The last thing to remember about safe browsing on the iPhone is to regularly clear out your cache. Not only will it free up some of the phone’s memory, but it will also get rid of any browsing history you have stored.

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Because the iPhone carries more personal information than any mobile phone ever before, having some form of security to protect this data is imperative. The iPhone carries its own form of protection in the form of a four-digit password to be entered every time the phone is switched on. This can be set up by accessing the Settings button from the home screen.

You can also set the time it takes for the iPhone to automatically lock the touch screen and insist that you enter the pass code to continue. While this isn’t a foolproof method for security, it does offer some peace of mind should the phone be stolen. If you forget the password, you can manually reset the iPhone back to its original settings through iTunes, however you’ll lose all your data at the same time.

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