Turn Off Your F@$king Phone

But not for the reason you think.

There is a lot of cyber hygiene advice out there – much of it repetitive, but most of it pretty good. Patch and update your phones and computers. Think before you click – Take9, as they say. Use good multifactor authentication (or passkeys!). Back up your data. Avoid public wifi without a good VPN. All good stuff – the reason you hear the same thing from many sources is that it works. So do it.

But there is one thing I don’t see out there very much. Turn. Off. Your. Phone. Like, a lot. Like at least once day if you can discipline yourself to do it. And not because you should spend more time with your family: lord knows the last thing I want is to listen to my kids any more than is absolutely necessary.

Rather, turn off your phone – and leave it off for a minute – because this will clear out a lot of bad stuff that can get on it. You can search for “memory resident malware” or “fileless malware” if you want to learn more, but the short version is that some of the really bad stuff out there will not survive a shut down if you leave your phone powered down for a bit (so do not just “restart” or immediately turn it back on).

You may have noted I said “some” of the bad stuff won’t survive; this is not a panacea, there are none. But it will protect you against some hard-to-detect malware that often does particularly nasty stuff. And if we can string together five or six things that solve, say, 10-15% of the problems out there, we’ll be getting somewhere.

Oh, and yeah, do this with your computers too. Smart people who know way more than me tell me it won’t do as much as on a phone, but it will help and could also make your computer run a little more efficiently.