The NSA Wants You to Regularly Turn Your Smartphone Off and On Again

How often do you turn your smartphone off? That doesn’t mean how often you put your phone “to sleep.” Hitting the power button and watching your display dim down doesn’t mean the phone is actually off—it’s just snoozing.

For most of us, that’s just fine. Our smartphones continue to work well enough without needing to power down the entire device and wait for it to reboot again. However, according to the NSA, not shutting your iPhone or Android down once a week puts you in harms way.

According to the security agency, powering off your smartphone every seven days is an effective deterrent against both zero-click exploits and spearphishing. Spearphishing is the act of tricking a victim into clicking a malicious link, usually from an email or other type of digital message, that then allows a bad actor to install malware on their system. This may lead to a zero-click exploit, where bad actors are able to attack your system without any user input at all—hence, “zero-click.”

Obviously, both zero-click exploits and spearphishing are bad, and preventing them from happening on your work or personal devices is paramount. If it’s as simple as turning off your iPhone or Android device once a week, that sounds like a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, the NSA doesn’t go into much detail as to why this move is so effective against these two types of exploits. In addition, the organization doesn’t claim it will prevent zero-click exploits or spearphishing 100% of the time. However, the general idea may be this: By regularly powering off your phone completely, you disconnect your device from both networks and processes bad actors rely on for the efforts to work. By breaking that connection, you keep your device reasonably protected.

Plus, it’s good practice to totally turn off any electronic device: By doing so, you allow the device to reset itself, which can help purge it of any typical glitches or issues it may be having from day-to-day use.

How to turn off your smartphone

On modern iPhones, long-press the power button and the volume up button. On modern Android devices, long-press the power button and the volume down button. On both platforms, this will pull up a power menu. On iPhone, you can slide the on-screen slider to power off. On Android, tap Power off.