2016年9月9日星期五

How Can Professionals Like Doctors, Lawyers and Financial Advisors Ensure Customer Data Security?



These days, the smartphone has become our most used personal tool. It accompanies us everywhere we go and we use it to store our important information. Professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and financial advisors are constantly dealing with confidential client information and they have an even greater need for information security. What advice can we give to these professionals to safeguard the client information on their phones? What features should professionals look for in a communications app in order to keep their client data secure?


We discuss 5 important information security features that communication apps should have and how CoverMe meets these requirements:

Does not link your phone number with your account.
Recent news reports have shown vulnerabilities in popular messaging apps due to the network SS7 bug that lets hackers assume a users phone number and take over their account.
A communications app should never use phone number SMS verification as a method to gain access to an account.
With CoverMe, there is no link between your phone number and your account, eliminating the possibility of hackers using the SS7 weakness to gain control of a users account.
Account should not provide password recovery service.
If hackers are able to crack your email account password, then they can use password recovery to gain entry into all your other accounts.
CoverMe does not provide password recovery service. Instead, when users lose their password, they can recover it themselves through multiple levels of verification, including user defined security questions and geographic location.
Log-in from only one device
For information security, CoverMe does not support log-in from multiple devices.
If a hacker somehow gains access to an account from another device, they will need to enter a master password, answer security questions set by the user and also be in the original geographical location where the master password was set in order to enter the account.
Data is only stored on local device
Usersdata is only stored locally on their device and is never stored on CoverMes servers.
This prevents leak of information if CoverMes servers are hacked.
Automatically record and store intruder break-in attempts.
If an intruder tries to break into a users account, their phones front facing camera will snap a picture of the intruder, the time and location of the break-in and send an alert to the user.
Get CoverMe from Google Play
Get CoverMe from Apple App Store

2016年8月25日星期四

CoverMe’s Vault: A Secure Space for Your Private Data



There are many reasons why you may want to keep some information on your phone hidden from others. You might have confidential business communications, personal information or anything else that you want to keep private. Android offers its users many features, but one important area where it is lacking is a secure space to store your private data. That’s where CoverMe can step in to help.


CoverMe allows you to:

1. Hide photos, videos, documents, audio clips and notes
The CoverMe personal android vault is a location which is fully encrypted and hidden from view. When you log in to the Personal Vault using your password, you access all your hidden and encrypted files. The Personal Vault can copy files from your main storage or other locations and lock these files away from those who you do not wish to see them with unbreakable encryption.

2. Use a secured camera (Vault Camera)
You can take pictures while you are in the android vault and the photos will be directly saved in the vault, without having to go through your phone’s camera roll.

3. Hide Contacts
Contacts can be stored in CoverMe android vault’s private address book. This way, if someone gets hold of your phone and looks through your system address book, they will never find the secret contacts you want to keep hidden.

4. Hide call/SMS logs
When you use CoverMe to make calls or send SMS, the calls and texts are encrypted and the record logs will not appear on your mobile phone bill, keeping your trail clean.

5. Manage passwords
With so many passwords that we need to remember, it is easy to forget a few. CoverMe’s android vault has a password manager that can help you safely store any password you wish to keep, such as bank account passwords, email passwords, etc. CoverMe can also generate unique hard-to-crack passwords for you to use.

6. Encrypted cloud storage
With CoverMe cloud storage, you can save all your confidential information in a special cloud space allocated just for you, accessible whenever you need. CoverMe’s cloud has multiple levels of password protection making it a highly secure place to store your documents.

CoverMe gives you additional features, including:
1. Dot lock (double password)
2. Shake-to-close
3. Auto-lock in background
4. Break-in alarm

How Safe is End-to-End Encryption?




In the last couple of years, the phrase “end-to-end encryption” has been appearing more often around the Internet and in the news . What exactly does it mean and how safe is it really?


End-to-end encryption  is a method of secure communication that prevents third-parties from accessing data while it's transferred from one device to another. In end-to-end encryption, the data is encrypted on the sender's device and only the recipient is able to decrypt it. Nobody in between, whether they are the Internet service provider, application service provider or hacker,  can read it or tamper with it. The cryptographic keys used to encrypt and decrypt the messages are stored exclusively on the sender and receiver’s devices.
Many mainstream communication platforms have adopted end-to-end encryption, including Apple iMessage, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, but how safe is this technology? Does it really protect your messages from the minute you send it till your recipient reads it?
Telegram Messenger is a communications app that offers end-to-end encryption for its users. Previously, we had learned that hackers can easily break into a Telegram messenger account by intercepting user authentication text messages.  Recent news reports have revealed a bug in Telegram that any information the user copies and pastes into their Telegram chats will be logged into syslog on macOS. Hackers can then find the syslog file and see messages from user chats.
This shows that end-to-end encryption has vulnerabilities depending on the application service provider. Let’s now discuss how CoverMe has been designed to prevent these vulnerabilities:
· CoverMe does not support log-in from multiple devices, removing the possibility for the kind of user authentication texts that allowed breaking-into Telegram accounts.
· User data is never saved on CoverMe’s servers, removing the risk of hackers breaking into our servers and accessing user data.
· CoverMe has effective intruder alarm notifications to alert you when someone has tried to break-into your account. When someone enters the wrong password to try to enter CoverMe, your phone’s front facing camera will take a picture of the intruder. The photo, time of break-in and even the GPS location of the break-in will be saved in a file for you to check later.
As you can see, not all end-to-end encryption apps are built the same. CoverMe has been carefully designed by security experts to be safe, reliable and protective of your personal data.
Attention Parents! Are Your Children Using Secret Text Apps?



Secret text apps were first developed for businesses to discuss confidential matters privately. Texts will automatically delete after being read, leaving no evidence of what was said. The sender can feel secure knowing that the message they sent won’t be read by anyone else but the recipient and the recipient does not need to remember to delete the message as the message will delete by itself. Not only do secret text apps have self-destructing messages, but the app icon can also be disguised so others won’t know that you are using a secret text app.


Gradually, other users in the general public started to catch on to the benefits of using secret text apps. Teenagers especially like to use these apps to send private messages to friends without their parents finding out. The teenage years are a difficult time for youngsters, they are going through emotional and body changes and sometimes they need a private communication method. There is nothing wrong with that and it can be healthy if your child has a friend they can trust and talk with. However, as parents, you should have a watchful eye on your child’s activities to make sure they are not getting in trouble or being tricked by people. Parents need to be aware of the types of secret text apps available and what they can do.
Some popular secret text apps:
1. Confide
Encrypted messages will self-destruct after being read. Confide is available for smartphones and for desktops allow cross platform communication. Confide prevents readers from taking screenshot on most platforms and only  a few words in the message can be read at a time. The reader moves their finger over the message to make words appear.

2. CoverMe
Messages sent between CoverMe users are protected by strong military-grade encryption technology. You can decide when your messages will be deleted: immediately after your recipient reads it or after a specified time. You can also remotely delete a message whenever you want to.

3. Cyber Dust
Billionaire Mark Cuban enters the messaging app world with Cyber Dust secret text app. Once the recipient views the Cyber Dust note, it vanishes permanently in 30 seconds. Messages and photos cannot be traced and are not stored anywhere – not even on Cyber Dust’s servers – assuring all users a high level of privacy and security.