1. Life span of the battery
Charging your phone with a low quality accessory(like a computer or a charger not meant for your phone) can reduce the life span of the battery. Computers are special designed to transfer files from your phone to the system or from the system to your phone, they are not meant to charge your phone but either way, they do charge it. if you have ever noticed, charging your phone with a computer is much slower than charging it with your phone's charger. This is so because the computer does not have the capacity to charge your battery ( its like using one stick of fire wood to boil water, eventually the water will start to boil but it will take a long period of time, and during this period, a lot could have gone wrong). Each time you charge your phone with a system, you are exposing your battery to the risk of having a short life span.
- It's like you eating rice and stew without fish or meat, just rice and stew. you know that's not a balanced diet, the diet is incomplete. So is the same as charging your phone with a computer, you are not giving your battery a balanced diet which can lead to short life span.
2. It can get your phone hacked.
According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, plugging your Iphone or Android smartphone into a computer results in a whole load of data being exchanged between the two devices. which includes the phone's name, the manufacturer, the device type, the serial number, firmware information, the operating system information, the file system and the electronic chip ID. The amount of data sent depends on the device and the host, but each smartphone transfers the same basic information.This information are enough for a hacker to break into a smartphone and take control, according to Kaspersky.
This technique was used in 2013 as part of the cyberespionage campaign RED OCTOBER . Thehacking team also made use of a computer connection to load a mobile device with malware. By checking the identification data received from the connected device, the hackers were able to discover the device model of the victim and then use this information to tailor their attack.
This would not have been as easy to achieve if smartphones did not automatically exchange data with a PC upon connecting to the USB port.
It you're worried about getting hacked in this way, Kaspersky Lab says there are several ways to protect yourself:
- Use only trusted USB charging points and computers to charge your device
- Protect your mobile phone with a password, or with another method such as fingerprint recognition, and don’t unlock it while charging
- Use encryption technologies and secure containers (protected areas on mobile devices used to isolate sensitive information) to protect the data
- Install some kind of antivirus software that is capable of detecting malware even if a "charging" vulnerability is used(CM security).
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