How to Protect Your Online Accounts With One Simple App

No one wants to get hacked. It’s an obvious if painful truth of the internet that having your online accounts hacked is both a major hassle and a potentially dangerous event. Beyond just the trouble of recovering your passwords and explaining to your friends that the porn invite you sent them on Facebook didn’t actually come from you, there is also the risk that a hacker could access sensitive information like credit card numbers and other personal data.

The big companies – Gmail, Facebook, Dropbox, etc – are of course constantly working to lock down user accounts and keep them safe. Beyond that, any responsible internet user should stay vigilant for phishing attacks and make sure to use multiple complex passwords. New technologies are also becoming standard, such as two-factor authentication, that send an SMS or other technique to double check that a login is real. By the way, if you aren’t using two-factor logins, turn it on now.

But sadly, all of these steps aren’t enough. Hackers are coming up with inventive new ways to access your information so it remains an all too common fact that online accounts will get hacked and users left to clean up the pieces. Fortunately, there are companies working to solve the problem.

One example is LogDog, a company that bills itself as a guard dog for your online accounts. LogDog, which we looked at briefly a few months ago, monitors multiple accounts for you such as your Gmail, Facebook, Dropbox, or Yahoo accounts. It alerts you if it detects suspicious activity – “barking” if you will, and telling you that someone may be trying to break into one of your accounts. After successfully launching on Android, the app is now making its way to iOS.

How is it able to do this better than the big tech giants themselves? One way is more advanced checks to prevent unauthorized access to your accounts. For instance, imagine someone uses your work computer to access your Facebook account. That won’t be flagged as unusual by Facebook since your work computer is an authorized machine. But LogDog goes beyond that and can see if you are using your phone at home – it knows you can’t be in two places at once and will mark that as suspicious activity.

Beyond that, it also does other sophisticated tests due to the fact that it works across multiple accounts. So if LogDog sees that you are using Facebook in one city, and your email halfway around the world, it knows this is a problem.

“LogDog works to keep users’ online accounts safe by analyzing multiple sources of information from the user’s accounts, together with information from the user’s device, to create a detailed usage pattern. As soon as there is the slightest deviation from this pattern we immediately alert the user,” said Uri Brison, LogDog’s CEO. “We do not store the user’s private passwords on our servers, further protecting users’ privacy as well as their accounts.”

LogDog is free (with premium options), so there’s really no reason not to download it and try it out. Internet security is no joke, it’s dangerous out there. Having your own web guard dog might be just what you need to stay safe.