A few months ago, my phone suddenly started acting… weird. I’d unlock it to check messages, and boom — a flashy popup would appear warning me that my device was infected. Sometimes it claimed my storage was full. Other times it told me I’d “won a prize.” One even had a countdown timer telling me …

It started with a tiny icon I had never really paid attention to. A small glowing dot near the top of my screen. At first, I assumed it appeared when I joined calls or recorded voice notes. That made sense. But one evening, while casually browsing the internet — not in a call, not recording …