While troubleshooting a customer's Android smartphone, you notice that web pages load very slowly and downloads frequently stall when the device uses cellular data. Signal strength is strong, but the data-usage meter shows a recently installed game has transferred several gigabytes of data in the background during the last few hours. According to CompTIA A+ best practices for identifying mobile OS security issues, which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the limited Internet connectivity?
The cellular provider is performing scheduled maintenance on nearby towers.
The game is a malicious application generating excessive network traffic.
The device's radio firmware is outdated and needs to be re-flashed.
Too many open browser tabs are exhausting the device's RAM.
Excessive background data usage from a malicious or poorly coded application can saturate the device's uplink and downlink, leaving little bandwidth for legitimate traffic. This results in slow or limited Internet connectivity even when signal strength is good. While carrier maintenance, outdated radio firmware, or low RAM can also degrade performance, they would not account for the unusually high background data transfers attributed to a single newly installed app, making the malicious-app explanation the most likely.
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What are some signs that an application on my mobile device might be malicious?
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What are other common causes of limited Internet connectivity on mobile devices?
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