Do you know what a ping is? Do you ever remember those movies where one ship or submarine sends out a sonar signal to determine the location of another ship or submarine? They make that ping sort of noise?
Well that is similar to a cell phone ping only, in the case of smart phones, it can open up more than just your location. If the phone has GPS or Internet connections, your location can be noted. If a bad guy wants to keep tabs on you, pinging your cell phone can alert him to your location at any moment.
The ping is the signal and is also a request for information. When the request is answered, that means there is a connection between the sender and the recipient. Cell phone spyware or malware could be the link connecting the victim’s mobile device and the bad guy’s computer and is only detectable through a mobile phone forensic analysis.
Cell phone forensic analysts can identify pings that have been sent to a phone. Through a forensic phone analysis completed by an expert with mobile device forensics tools and software, the spyware can be found and then removed. The expert analyst can recover cell phone data including the spyware that has been installed.
When the analyst completes the forensic cell phone data recovery and finds pings, it can indicate that a bad guy has access to your phone and that means the malware he has installed can infiltrate the operating system and provide access to calls, texts, emails and more. What’s more, anything that has been deleted is probably not completely gone and a cell phone deleted data recovery can reveal anything that someone has attempted to delete. That means that even if the bad guy knew you were suspicious and removed the malware, its presence may still be traceable during a cell phone analysis.
So while pings may sound like a funny little thing, ping experts will tell you they are really interesting, but not so funny, especially when there’s a bad guy at the other end.
-Brenda McGinley, CEO, All in Investigations, All in Investigations
