With Malaysians increasingly reliant on smartphones for both personal and work data, experts warn of growing cyber risks and emphasise the need for enhanced protection measures to prevent data breaches and personal information theft.
Smartphones have become the main entry point to the internet for most Malaysians, and the amount of personal and work-related information stored on them is now wide-ranging enough to make them attractive targets for cybercrime. According to Kaspersky, 72% of respondents in the Asia-Pacific region said a smartphone is their primary device for accessing the internet, and Malaysian users were even more likely to keep practical and sensitive material on their handsets, including work emails, notes, shopping information, AI chat histories and access to work systems.
The scale of mobile dependence is part of a broader regional shift away from the PC as the central computing device. Kaspersky said photographs and videos remain the most common type of content saved on smartphones, but the device is increasingly being used as a repository for contacts, messages, personal documents, banking details and passwords. That combination of convenience and sensitivity, the company warned, has created a security gap: people are loading more valuable data on phones without changing their protection habits at the same pace.
Anton Kivva, a cyber security expert at Kaspersky, said smartphones now function as full-featured assistants that touch nearly every part of daily life. He said the key issue is no longer what people store, but how they protect it. The company’s advice is to avoid keeping important data only on a phone, to use secure storage for passwords and identity documents, and to back up files regularly so they can be recovered if a device is lost, stolen or damaged.
Kaspersky also pointed to wider mobile threat trends in Malaysia. It said it blocked more than 18.8 million web-based cyber threats in the country in 2025, averaging more than 51,000 attempted malicious incidents a day. That warning comes alongside broader concerns about online tracking and privacy: in a separate analysis, Kaspersky said it detected more than 38 billion instances of data collection from 25 prevalent web tracking services in 2024, averaging about 1 million detections a day. The company says mobile users should treat phones with the same level of security discipline they would apply to a laptop, including app scanning, anti-phishing tools, location services, automatic backups and instant auto-lock.
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