Most of them won’t have an immediate or drastic effect, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do everything you can to avoid them. Statistically, there is a high likelihood you will encounter an infection many times throughout your life.
The most talented hackers will attempt to make their exploits act silently, without raising alarms from the unsuspecting users. Some types of infection, called “exploits” by the security community, have a noticeable effect on the performance, reliability or function of a computer or mobile device - others do not. There are two simple things you can do to prevent a malware infection: Maintain a higher level of skepticism and suspicion around technology, and put software or services in place to monitor for a breach.
The biggest reason for the rise in security breaches and exploits is that most people have a trusting nature, even knowing that some free apps out there are fishy. Programs, apps, application programming interfaces (APIs) and websites can all carry malicious pieces of code that can not only “infect” a host device, but can also take less noticeable actions, like capture inputs, scrape information from contact lists, share location and mine cryptocurrencies - all of which can eventually result in stolen credentials, stolen identity, stolen resources or a ransomware attack.
