These days you see a new vulnerability being discovered in Android or other operating systems. And before you know one of those malicious apps start exploiting these newly discovered vulnerabilities to infect your devices and control them. For example, recently a set of four vulnerabilities called QuadRooter were discovered and followed by the discovery of the Tordow trojan that came piggybacked on dozens of malicious apps and was exploiting these vulnerabilities.
Some of these trojans can keep an eye on your activities including recording the videos through the smartphone camera, taking pictures and recording the sound from your microphone. While it is relatively easy to prevent the camera misuse by just covering the camera lens, it is a little harder to prevent the unauthorized recording of sound through your microphone.
If your Android smartphone is affected by some unknown vulnerabilities, then you should try a new app called Paranoia Lite to block the microphone whenever you want. The app shows a red screen when the microphone is unblocked and shows a big green screen when the microphone is blocked. You can tap on the microphone icon in the app to toggle blocking of the microphone.
The lite version of this app can be used to block only the microphone, but paid version can also block other things like the camera, Wi-Fi, text messaging and the mobile data usage. In the settings of the app, you can choose to make the app’s icon appear in the notification bar. You can also configure the app to create an audible and visible alert when it is not able to block the microphone use by some other app or service.
Conclusion: Paranoia Lite can be used to block unauthorized attempts to use the microphone and record the audio. This app is specially useful if your Android smartphone is affected by some of the known vulnerabilities.
You can get the Paranoia Lite app for Android from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.locmanmobile.paranoiafree&hl=en.