avast! Anti-Theft can help you to recover your phone by controlling it remotely in the event that it gets lost or stolen. This is a short introduction to the program and its capabilities, which are unique in the market.
First of all, you were able to choose a disguised name for your avast! Anti-Theft during the installation. The reason for this is to make the application invisible to a thief. The longer a thief is unaware of the application, the longer you will be able to keep control of it and the higher your chances of getting it back. Whenever you search for your Anti-Theft installation, look for it by this disguised name.
avast! Anti-Theft performs certain actions automatically as you will see below, but it is also possible to use Anti-Theft to control your phone remotely by SMS command or by sending commands via our new web interface my.avast.com. For this you just need to pair your device with your online account by accessing the avast! Account settings page either within avast! Mobile Security or avast! Anti-Theft.
Important advice: You can find a list of the SMS commands within this help.
Once installed, you will need to personalize your avast! Anti-Theft settings. You only need to specify a few basic settings; the advanced settings are already preconfigured but may be changed according to your preferences.
First of all, enter your name to set up the owner of the device.
Secondly you will have to create your avast! PIN. The avast! PIN consists of 4 to 6 digits.
It is important to remember the PIN in order to continue to access Anti-Theft because once the Anti-Theft protection is enabled, as an additional protection measure, avast! Anti-Theft will hide itself from the app launcher and you will not be able to launch the program from there. Now, whenever you CALL this avast! PIN, in the same way as you would call a phone number, this call will be interrupted and Anti-Theft will be opened immediately.
Additionally the PIN is used to authorize commands sent to your phone. Every command begins with that PIN and ensures that the command will not be visible. If the PIN is wrong, the command will be treated as a standard SMS and will be visible in your SMS inbox as normal.
Third, you will need to specify one or two phone numbers of friends or family members who will receive the Anti-Theft notifications from your phone. Usually, some time after a phone is stolen, the thief may change the SIM card of the phone. As you would normally not know the new phone number, you would then lose the ability to contact your phone and control it using the SMS commands. However, avast! Anti-Theft will recognize the SIM card change and will send the new phone number plus the phone location data to the friend or family phone numbers that you specified.
Now Anti-Theft is ready to go. Enable Anti-Theft by checking the option in the basic settings menu. Now Anti-Theft is actively protecting your phone and can help you to recover it in the event of loss or theft.
avast! Anti-Theft allows you to fine-tune its behavior.
First of all, Anti-Theft does certain things whenever a SIM card is changed or whenever you send a "LOST" command to the phone, marking the phone as lost. It can, for example, lock access to the phone. The advantage of locking your phone is that it will prevent thieves from accessing your data. A siren can also be activated, however both of these actions will also draw the thief's attention to the Anti-Theft feature, whereas he would continue to be unaware of it otherwise. It is your decision whether it is more important to block access to your phone, or to maintain invisibility.
Another important security measure is to deny thieves or finders access to the Android program manager or to the Android phone settings in general. While this also might draw the attention of the thief to Anti-Theft, it prevents it from being uninstalled and also prevents unwanted modifications to your phone settings.
It might be also useful to know if the battery on your lost phone runs low, as this means that the phone will no longer be accessible soon. If you check the option, Anti-Theft will post a notification to your account. The notification also contains location data, if available. Additionally you can select if you want to send that notification ALWAYS, not just in the case of your phone being marked as lost.
Last but not least, if you installed Anti-Theft rooted, there are some additional options. First, you can automatically prevent USB debugging access to the phone and thereby prevent thieves to control your phone by abusing the USB connection and to modify, install or uninstall apps. Forcing the data connection to stay alive is another option. If you force the data connectivity to stay alive, thieves will not be able to disable the WIFI or 3G connection, keeping the phone connected and reachable via the internet for as long as possible.
When locking the phone, Anti-Theft will display a lock screen. You may specify a custom lock text to be shown on that screen. For example, there can be a message offering a reward for returning the phone, increasing the chances of getting a lost phone back if it is found by an honest finder.
As mentioned above, Anti-Theft will recognize any SIM card change and will send the new phone number plus the phone location data to your friend's or family member's phone. You can also use the LOCATE command which will trigger the same locationing behavior.
avast! Anti-Theft can enable the GPS setting on demand. This will always work if you installed Anti-Theft rooted but there are some restrictions on non-rooted phones. First of all, on non-rooted phones the auto-enabling only works from Android 1.6 up to Android 2.2. For Android 2.3 and later, Google has removed the necessary interfaces to implement this functionality.
Secondly, the GPS auto-enabling can cause unwanted popups on the phone. This is the reason why you can choose if you want to use the GPS auto-enabling. After enabling the setting it is recommended to disable GPS in the system settings and to test if those popups occur by accessing the Anti-Theft main screen, pressing the menu key and selecting Simulate theft event. If popups occur it is recommended to keep the setting disabled.
Geofencing is a useful feature to protect your device when you stay at a location for a longer time, e.g. if you go to a bar. Turn on the geofence when you arrive at the location. If the device leaves the defined area without geofencing being disabled, it will be treated as theft event and the device will be marked as stolen, triggering all associated protection behaviors (like locking your device).
If a person wrongly enters the Android lock screen password for more than 3 times, you can cause Anti-Theft to mark the device as lost, triggering all associated protection behaviors (like locking your device). Additionally it is possible for Anti-Theft to take a picture of the person in that very moment. Note that this feature only works if a password screen is actually set up on your device.
Wiping the phone is one important task that Anti-Theft can do for you by command, if you do not expect to get your phone back and you do not want the thief to be able to access your personal data.
Up to Android 2.1, the wipe is somewhat restricted as a factory reset of the phone is not possible. However, Anti-Theft will try to delete as much as possible, for example contacts, SMS, SD card and so on.
From Android 2.2 on you have full wipe capabilities. However, to do a full wipe, Anti-Theft needs to be configured as a so-called Android device administrator. By using the Device admin link you can open the Android settings page to set up Anti-Theft as a device administrator, enabling Anti-Theft to do the full wipe. Please note that Android prevents uninstallation of device administrators. So if you are unable to uninstall Anti-Theft please double check that this setting is disabled, then you should be able to uninstall as usual.
Whenever Anti-Theft wipes the phone, the content of any SD cards will also be deleted. In the standard way, Anti-Theft will only delete the file directory. This is the fastest way, but sophisticated thieves will be able to restore the deleted data using special tools. However, Anti-Theft also offers you the so-called "thorough wipe". The thorough wipe will take up to ten minutes, but will physically and irrecoverably delete the actual contents of your SD card. It is your choice whether to select the maximum level of security by using the thorough wipe option.
As already mentioned, Anti-Theft can sound a loud siren repeatedly to shock and draw unwanted attention to the thief. Anti-Theft comes with a standard siren sound, but you can also record your own siren sound or select an appropriate sound file.
Note that, on some devices the default sound recording utility (Sound Recorder) is not present and it may therefore not be possible to record your own siren sounds on those devices.
For rooted Anti-Theft installations, we offer an additional security feature. If you installed Anti-Theft in rooted mode, it will be able to even survive factory resets of the phone. However, for this to work it is not enough just to install Anti-Theft in rooted mode because then, while the app itself would survive a factory reset, the app settings would be deleted.
The solution is to also store the Anti-Theft settings in rooted mode. So, once you are done with setting up Anti-Theft as you want it, as a last step you need to store the settings hard-reset-proof. There is a wizard to guide you through this so it should be quite straight forward. However, do not forget to do the hard-reset store every time you modify your Anti-Theft settings, otherwise any changes will be lost following a factory reset.