There have been news reports of governments using cell phones to spy on its citizens, but what is even more dangerous is that a proficient hacker can turn a smartphone into a virtually remote controlled spy device.

Smartphones today are being used for almost everything we do like chatting with friends, checking email, net banking etc. A lot of our personal and professional life has come online and a hacker can get to know where his victim works, family background and friends etc.

A hacked smartphone can send user's location and text messages to the hacker who can also remotely activate the camera in the smartphone.

All a hacker needs to do is paste a malicious code into a mobile application or a game like angry birds and send it to the target phone, if the user of the phone installs the game or application the smartphone turns into a spy for the hacker with the novice user unable to know that the phone is hacked and transmitting personal information to the hacker.

One way to know that the application being installed has a malware is if the application asks for access to the camera or contacts list. The best way to avoid malware is to download the applications from their official source rather than a third party web site.

A worrying fact is that many companies sell such software online and although it is difficult to ascertain whether such software actually works, most experts agree that it is relatively easy to write the code for such malware.

Kevin McNamee, director of Kindsight Security Labs, and his colleagues for example wrote a malicious code which can be injected into an Android app like Facebook or Angry birds and this code is sufficient to get all the information a hacker needs to spy on the victim. This was done to prove how relatively easy and powerful hacking a smartphone can be.

A malicious code does not require the host program to be running always to be active and will keep running even if the infected game or application is closed.

With many web sites online teaching people the simple tricks of hacking it is getting more and more difficult to guard against hackers.