Will switching your phone off every day help fend off cyber threats?

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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has a simple tip for Australians to help ward off cyber threats.

“We all have a responsibility … turn your phone off every night for five minutes … do it while you are brushing your teeth and whatever you are doing,” he said last week. “This is a task for all of us.”

Turning off your mobile phone every 24 hours will wipe some, but not all, exploits from your phone.Credit: Shutterstock

Following high-profile hacks of Optus, Medibank and, most recently, government-contracted law firm HWL Ebsworth, the private sector is already on notice over its responsibility to ward off cyberattacks that could have widespread effects on Australians.

Albanese’s message, delivered during the announcement of a new national co-ordinator for cybersecurity, was meant to “mobilise” smartphone users towards more tech-savvy behaviour in a world where online threats are everywhere.

The advice isn’t new – the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre says people should turn off their smartphones if they’re not in use, while the United States’ National Security Agency recommended in 2020 that people switch off their phones once a week.

But some within the cybersecurity community question whether the tip was the right one to impart.

Australian National University national security expert Katherine Mansted said it came down to someone’s risk profile.

“For people of the prime minister’s stature and other high-risk individuals, that extra layer of things like turning your phone off occasionally might be good advice. For most of us, we really need to make sure we’re nailing the basics of cyber hygiene,” Mansted said.

The basics include downloading your device’s software updates, creating strong passwords, using multifactor authentication to bolster security, and watching out for – and not clicking on – scam texts.

Security consultant Troy Hunt described the prime minister’s advice as nonsensical.

“Why five minutes? Why not one minute? Why not 10 minutes?” he said, adding it was more of a question of what a consumer was doing with their device, given smartphones were designed to run around the clock.

Hunt said modern smartphones were “extraordinarily” resilient to malware, and that the likelihood of some of it being installed on devices without user prompts was so rare there were hefty bounties for those who found vulnerabilities.

“There’s one class of risk where you are specifically targeted because you offer some kind of high value,” he said, naming world leaders and political dissidents as examples.

However, he said most users should focus instead on downloading verified apps from app stores and reading the permissions being sought during installation.

Nigel Phair from the UNSW Institute for Cyber Security said Albanese’s advice was levelled at “quite sophisticated” cybercriminal activity, and that rebooting a smartphone might only pause the withdrawal of sensitive information in that case, rather than stop it altogether.

“I look at things like the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] had over $3 billion in reported scam losses last year. We should be focusing our consumer efforts on stopping people falling prey to those types of things,” he said.

But Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre chief executive Rachael Falk said while it was not a magic solution, turning your phone off regularly was a good habit to get into.

“Turning it off every 24 hours will wipe some, but not all, exploits from your phone,” she said. By “exploits”, Falk meant a hack or malicious code introduced onto the phone by clicking a suspicious link, for example.

Turning it off would, in some cases, remove the malware, she said, but other more threatening software might require the device to be wiped altogether.

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