How Juice Jacking is a threat for Smartphone for data theft

Last updated on July 26th, 2020 at 11:02 am

Those who are habitual to forget to charge your Smartphone at home, when, the battery of their smartphone is dying, they look desperately recharging point even in public places like shopping malls, Airports, Bus stand, hotels, etc to recharge their phones but these are the points where charging your smartphone may cost you.

Often such peoples forget to carry mobile phone charger and they use USB ports at these charging points and these USB charging points are real danger for hacking or data theft.

When you connect your smartphone to these USB ports for charging, the hacker gets access to your smartphone by infected cable and exfiltrate data or upload malware onto your smartphone. The illegitimately access to data of your smartphone is called Juice Jacking.

Juice Jacking can be understood as a form of cyber-attack on your smartphone. The data of your smartphone is your lifeline because it contains confidential contacts/ call details/ data/ photos/ videos and it is more than your wallet because you are using banking services from your phone, you use apps to pay bills so Juice Jacking may wipe your bank account also.

You know, how attackers get access to the data of your smartphone?  Actually attackers get access to your phone by USB cable used for charging. You must be aware that USB cable has five pins, out of which one is used for charging, while two pins are meant for data transfer and attackers use these two pins, meant for data transfer, to access your smartphone. So as soon as you connect your phone through a USB cable to the USB port on these recharging stations, the attacker may get access to your smartphone. 

So to avoid access to data of your smartphone, Juice Jacking, please adopt following precautions.

1. Make it habit to charge your phone at home or office only and keep it fully charged when you go out.
2. Keep your Personal Charger always in your bag
3. Buy a power bank and keep it fully charged while going out so that you can charge your phone with it.
4. Nowadays USB cable is available in the market meant for charging only, i.e. these USB cable use one pin and data wires either removed or shorted out. So buy one such USB cable and use it for charging.
5. You can avoid fast dying of battery of your smartphone by disabling data, when not in use so that you can save the battery and you may need not to charge it outside your home/office.

Hope these steps will prevent your data theft by juice jacking, share your views in the comment box.