When visiting certain high-risk countries on business, your smartphone activity may be monitored by local intelligence services. From fake cell towers to malicious carrier updates, spies in these countries have a number of ways to install malware on your device through your cellular connection alone. As such, it’s best to assume that your smartphone has been compromised when on foreign soil.

There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!

- a line from the 1992 film Sneakers

Pentagon’s smartphone policy costs taxpayers an estimated $2 million per day

On May 22, Pentagon leadership banned smartphones from all secure spaces – effectively every office and meeting room in the largest single office building in the world. The ban even includes government-issued phones given to high-priority personnel and negatively impacts over 26,000 Department of Defense military, civilian and contractor employees.