The despicable phone hacking scandal from the News of the World was, very simply put, reporters obtaining ones mobile phone number by whatever means available and carrying out phishing attacks on that handsets voice mail box in the hope they would get lucky and unfortunately, they did get lucky far too many times. You can be sure that your mobile phone insurance will not cover you from the kinds of loss some of these reporters may cause.

So how can you make your mobile phone more secure?

Well there are several ways to do this, the most extreme, but most secure method is to simply turn your mail box feature off, and then there is no mail box to be hacked into. Personally, I turned my mail box off over a year ago and have never looked back. The handset itself will keep a list of missed calls, so you can decide to call these people back if you want to hear from them!

If you have no intention of turning your mail box off, then there are still a couple of simple steps you can take to make your mail box far more secure with very little work.

Firstly and foremost, change your PIN number from the default given to you by your network provider, as you can be sure something like 0000 or 1234 will be the first numbers any hackers would try making use of. Secondly, avoid using your date of birth or that of any of your family, as hackers may have access to these dates and you can be sure they will be giving them a try.

Another tip to keep your mail box safe would be to limit the size of the mail box to keep just a few messages in it. Hand in hand with limiting the size of your mail box would be to delete messages as soon as you have listened to them, rather than keeping a library of content for any would be hacker to get their hand on.

You will probably find in the near future that mobile phone networks will no longer offer a default PIN number and you will be required to choose a secure PIN number before you can activate a new voice mail box.

Source: http://mobilephoneinsurance.org/mobile-phone-voicemail-security/