Software to find if cellphone or tablet has been hacked

I'm wondering if anyone has used some of the forensic software that analyzes cell phones to find out if they have been hacked or are being monitored. From what I have seen, this software is very expensive (like $10K) for some licenses, and up to $50K for more advanced versions (and that may be only for a year, IDK..). I wonder what they really do and if they are truly proprietary software or a nice front end put on a lot of open-source software/code that make everything accessible from a GUI and puts in a nice neat package.

I looked for alternatives and one site compared the top forensic software with about 20-24 free (or nearly free) pieces of software that could do the same thing as the expensive ones, but you have to know how to use each one of them and some are pretty complex like the Kali Linux suite (long list of apps), TCPdump, Wireshark, etc. not programs someone is going to just sit down and use the first time around and see if their phone is compromised.

Has anyone found anything that is useful or have any thoughts on a good way to go about doing this? I've seen services offered online to both test the phone to see if it has been hacked, or to install tracking/monitoring software and or clone the phone (supposedly to catch cheating spouses) - some of it seems illegal unless you are cloning your own personal phone, though IDK. There are advertisements in local webpages for it, some private investigation firms and even attorneys. The prices are VERY high for the services though.

I'm wondering if anyone has used some of the forensic software that analyzes cell phones to find out if they have been hacked or are being monitored.

I don't have much to add to this thread but thanks for starting it. My credit card info was stolen -- most likely because of a hack on my cell phone -- after this company forced me to use my cellphone to place an order with them. I didn't lose any funds -- but had to wait a week for a new ATM card.

Anyway, if I were really determined to use forensics at home, for free, on my cell phone I would put my laptop's card in PROMISC mode and use tcpdump to dump packets originating with my cellphone, textools to strip and save the IP's, and then a homegrown script invoking netstat or whois to resolve the IP where possible to alphanumeric. Then I'd generate a short list of mysterious IP addresses and start googling them to see what the online hacker-chatter has to say about them.

It would be a lot of work for someone like me who knows very little, and I'd probably lose sleep with paranoia trying to determine what was suspicious and what was simply normal traffic.

Also that would be with the proviso of force-stopping all unnecessary processes on the phone and then running individual apps. Third-party apps are the most likely source of intrusion on a cell phone, unless of course you've been browsing sketchy sites or streaming (illegal?) content, in which case your friendly browser itself may be to blame.

generally, forensics software use requires training and skills to use. there is lots of tools for this sort of thing. only they generally have some sort of knowledge dependency.

its not all bad, start with running multiple AV software like windows defender + malwarebytes. sorta thing.... and the sysinternal tools have an option to submit to virustotal ....

edit, same thing for phones and tablets , only you dont have as many tools. clean reset is best.