5 Tips to Protect Your Phone from Hackers

Celebrities and politicians aren’t the only ones who have to worry about hackers breaking into their phones. We all use our phones for many important tasks. Aside from the obvious ones – making  a phone call and sending text messages– we use our phones to take photos and videos, store documents and passwords and even to do our banking. Hackers can break into our phone by intercepting our phone calls and texts or hacking into the data stored on our phones.

Here are 5 tips to help protect your phone:

1. Use strong passwords

· Avoid using obvious passwords like birthdays, the name of your pet or spouse, consecutive number sequences like “12345” or repeated numbers like “88888”.

· A password generator can help you create unique random passwords that will be very hard for hackers to crack. The CoverMe app contains just such a function to help you create safe and secure passwords.

2. Use a protected app to store pin numbers and credit cards numbers

· Don’t just leave your pin numbers and credit card numbers in a note on your phone where they can be easily found.

· It’s better to store these important numbers in an app that is heavily protected against hackers. CoverMe has a special vault to store important data and it is protected with military-grade technology to prevent hackers getting in.

3. Use a phone lock app

· You should add another layer of security on your most important apps, such as banking apps

· CoverMe lets you lock individual apps with secure password protection. You can select which apps to lock so you don’t need to lock your entire phone.

4. Use an encrypted communications app

· To prevent hackers from intercepting your calls and texts, an encrypted communications app is a must.

· CoverMe uses advanced 256-bit encryption technology to protect your phone. Your calls and texts are scrambled before they are sent and only your receiver holds the key to decipher the messages.

5. Take care of your Bluetooth settings

· Avoid using unprotected Bluetooth networks and turn off your Bluetooth service when you aren’t using it.

· Make sure “Discoverable” mode is disabled to prevent others from discovering it by scanning for available devices.

These 5 tips can help you protect your phone from hackers and you will sleep better knowing that you’ve done everything you can to avoid data leaks. 

Second Phone Number for Private Calling

There are many times in our lives when we will need a second phone number for some reason. For example – dating, work or just to have a convenient and safe private number to use for private calling.

When you first start to date a person, you do not know how the relationship will go. It may turn out to be the love of your life or a nightmare that you would rather forget about. So it’s important to have a disposable number that you can easily set-up and terminate if the relationship goes sour. We sure don’t want to be bothered for months by that guy or girl who won’t leave us alone! CoverMe offers private phone numbers for the U.S. and Canada and they are real phone numbers that you can use to text and call anyone in the world.

When your relationship is going great, you also can make use of the features in CoverMe’s private calling. When you have one private phone number to use with your loved one then your private calling won’t be interrupted by other people.

You can also have a different phone number for different purposes. Having a second phone number just for business calls is very useful. You can set-up personalized alerts so that you know who one is calling you. When you are at work, you can ignore calls to your personal number. When you are at home, you can ignore calls to your business number. Being able to separate our personal life from our business life lets us be more efficient and professional while at work and allows us to enjoy our rest time when we leave work.

With CoverMe’s private phone number, you can also have voice mail features to help you record important calls. You can block numbers from people who you don’t want to contact you anymore and you can enjoy encrypted calls if the person you are calling is also using CoverMe.

CoverMe’s private phone number has excellent call quality and you can choose inexpensive packages to suit your needs.

Let CoverMe Protect Your Messages!

We live in an era where privacy is a luxury. Any photos , videos or messages that we send to our friends are at risk of being intercepted and read by others. If the message safely reaches your friend without being intercepted, your own friend may pass on your message to others without your permission. How can you make sure your messages are not intercepted or passed on without your consent? You can let CoverMe’s encrypted messaging take care of your security worries!

CoverMe’s engineers are experts at designing functions to protect your private messages, photos and videos. Our encryption technology is proven to withstand brute force hacking and end-to-end encrypted messaging means that only you and your receiver can read the messages you send with the CoverMe app. Even if hackers can intercept your message, they will not be able to decipher your message without the unique encryption key held by your recipient. The encrypted messaging is so safe that not even CoverMe’s own engineers can decipher the message.

Another special function from CoverMe is that you can have your messages delete automatically after your recipient reads it. You can set the message to delete immediately after reading, delete after a certain time or you can recall the message when you want. This great function helps ensure that your recipient will not be able to send the message to others without you knowing about it. You reduce the spread of your private messages, photos and videos. You can send top-secret messages that will disappear from your recipients phone and you won’t leave any evidence behind.

The CoverMe mobile app also has many other useful functions to help you protect your privacy in this modern world. CoverMe’s private vault stores your data in an invisible, impenetrable vault and our cloud storage service gives you a secure space in the cloud to back-up your data. The private vault, secure cloud storage and encrypted messaging all make CoverMe an indispensable app for your phone.

Best Android Apps of 2016: 5 Apps You Must Try

Every year, new Android phone apps are coming to the market to let you make the most of your Android mobile device. We’ve scoured the selection of new apps as well old favourites to bring you a list of the top 5 Android phone apps you should download now.

1. Best for Fitness: 7 Minute Workout

We all have the best intentions to lose weight, but joining a gym is expensive and who has time to fit a session at the gym into their busy lives? 7 Minute Workout is such a great Android phone app because it focuses on short, high-intensity workouts that are scientifically proven to aid weight loss. Whenever you can fit in a few minutes, just start an exercise from the app and you’re on your way to a fitter you.

2. Best for Secure Private Communications: CoverMe

Provides end-to-end encryption to protect your chats and calls. You can store contacts, photos, videos and even passwords in a private impenetrable vault that can be hidden from view. You can even make your texts automatically delete after they’ve been read. Get a private phone number and texts will be directly sent into the app and call logs never appear on your phone bill.

3. Best for Education: Khan Academy

For inquisitive minds who never want to stop learning, Khan Academy gives you access to over 10,000 video tutorials covering topics such as Math, Science, History, etc.. You can stream videos online or download them to watch offline later. You can set your education goals and track your progress.

4. Best for Navigation: HERE

HERE from Nokia offers all the features you expect such as turn-by-turn navigation and satellite imagery. Where it sets itself apart is that you can download maps of entire countries and use it offline without spending precious MBs. This is especially useful if you are travelling to a different country, want to use a navigation app but don’t want to incur expensive roaming charges.

5. Best for Image Editing: PhotoDirector

PhotoDirector is simple and easy to use but it gives you a host of advanced features to make your photos stunning. You can remove an unwanted person or object from your photo, adjust saturation, tweak the tone, apply one-click photo presets, or even add HDR effects, to create vivid, beautiful images on the go.

A Secret Vault to Hide Your Private Photos

Most of us use our smartphones to take some photos and also some videos. These photos and videos show the events in our lives and tells a lot of information about us. Leaving them on your phone’s camera roll makes it easy for other people to find. For example, if you leave your phone for a minute to go to the bathroom, the people around you can easily grab your phone and look at all your photos!

That’s why you should use a photo vault app like CoverMe to safely and securely hide your private photos and videos. With CoverMe’s personal photo vault app, you can import photos and videos from your phone’s camera roll directly into the vault. You can then delete the photos and videos from your camera roll. The vault is encrypted with military-grade technology and cannot be hacked and broken into.

You can also take photos and videos directly from within the CoverMe photo vault app. The photos and videos taken this way will never appear on your phone’s camera roll and is stored immediately in the CoverMe vault.

What’s more, you can use CoverMe’s decoy function to create different accounts. With your main password, you enter the account where all your most private photos and videos are stored. With your decoy password, you create an account that you can put photos and videos that you don’t mind other people seeing. You should use your decoy password when you are around other people and only use your main password and account when you know you are alone. This way, when other people see you using your decoy account and typing in your decoy password, you have nothing to worry about. If someone learns your decoy password and uses it to enter CoverMe, they will only get access to your decoy account. The photos and videos stored in the vault in your main account will be safely hidden.

So don’t leave your important photos and videos unprotected anymore! Use CoverMe photo vault app to hide your photos away.

How To Hide Private SMS and Call Logs on Android

The SMS records on your phone contain a lot of private information – who we are messaging and what we are saying. Our phone call logs can also reveal a lot about us – who we call, how often we call them and at what times. If you leave your phone unattended for just a few minutes, your family members or colleagues can grab your phone and read all your private SMS. Or what if your friend needs to borrow your phone to make a call and then he sneakily peeks into your call logs and SMS?

The best way to protect your call logs and private SMS is to use a mobile security app such as CoverMe to hide your records. With Android version 4.0 and after, CoverMe can automatically intercept text messages and send them directly into the CoverMe app.

When you get a private phone number from CoverMe, all the text messages you send and receive from this number will not go through your phone’s messaging system but will instead go straight into the CoverMe app. Once your private SMS are in CoverMe, they are protected by great security features like multiple levels of password safety and intruder detection. All the calls you make and receive from your CoverMe private phone number will not appear on your phone bill either, leaving no trace of evidence about your calls.

You can also hide your private contacts inside the CoverMe app. When you add a contact into the private address book in CoverMe, you will be asked if you want to delete the contact from your phone’s address book. If you choose to delete, then this contact information will only exist in CoverMe and will no longer be in your phone’s contact list.

CoverMe helps you keep your communications private by directly sending private SMS to CoverMe app, hiding call logs and contacts,. Applying for a private CoverMe phone number is the first step towards keeping controlling of your phone’s data.

Keep Your Chat Private With This Secure Group Messaging App

When young people discover the latest hot trends, they love to tell all their friends about it. Sending a message to each friend one by one can take a lot of time, especially if you are a social butterfly with hundreds of friends! Group messages are a good way to spread the information quickly, but just how safe is group messaging?

We are familiar with CoverMe’s secure encrypted private text messages, but did you know that CoverMe also offers secure group messaging? All the features that make CoverMe’s text messages so secure and safe are included for the group messages.

To prevent members of your group chat from spreading your message to others without your consent, you can configure messages to disappear after the recipient has read them. You can send messages that self-destruct immediately after reading or at a scheduled time and you can directly recall a message.

CoverMe’s military-grade encryption algorithm that keeps your text messages private also works for secure group messaging. Only you and your group members can read the message because an encryption key is needed to decode the message and only your recipients have that encryption key. Messages are not saved on CoverMe’s servers, so you don’t have to worry about security leaks.

CoverMe’s gives you two types of secure group messaging . You can start a group chat where any member can send a message and all the other members can read and reply to the message. This option is good for when you’re planning a group event and you want everyone’s input and discussion. The other type of secure group messaging  is a broadcast message where you send a message to many people. All the members see that you are the sender and they can read and reply to your message, but they will not see the replies from other members. This kind of message is good for when you need to send a message to many people but you do not want them to interact with each other.

How to Keep Your Private Message Safe from Text Snoopers?

We spend at least 8 hours of our daily lives at our workplace. During this time, it is only natural that you will sometimes have to send and reply to some personal text messages. Maybe you need to tell your husband to buy some groceries for dinner that night or maybe you need to send a quick text to your mother to remind her to take her medicine.  But did you know that your company can be monitoring all your text communications? This is especially true if you are using a work issued smartphone.

Companies do have a legal right to monitor your communications on work mobile devices, but sometimes sending a private message is just unavoidable and it becomes an invasion of employees’ rights and privacy.

What can we do to keep our private messages from text snoopers? You can use an encryption app like CoverMe to send secure end-to-end encrypted messages. When you send a private message on CoverMe, it is encrypted and then sent to your recipient who has an encryption key to descramble the message. With CoverMe’s military-grade algorithms, your messages cannot be read by anyone else. Even CoverMe’s programmers are not able to decode your message.

The recipient also needs to have CoverMe app installed on their phone in order for the encryption to work. CoverMe app is available for iPhone and Android phones and is free for download.

Now you can send secure private messages without worrying that someone will be reading them. Of course this is not to say that you should spend your whole day at work sending personal messages! Work is still your priority, but when you need to fire off a quick message to your friends about the meet-up later that night you can do so without worrying that your boss will be spying on you.

Not only does CoverMe app let you send encrypted text messages, but you can also make encrypted phone calls that will not be intercepted and listened in on.

How To Make Anonymous Calls

Sometimes you need to make a call to someone you are not familiar with and you don’t want that person to know your real number. Once that person has your real phone number, it can lead to months and months of unwanted phone calls. You use your real phone number for work, for your business accounts and your private life. You can’t just terminate your real phone number and get a new one! Think about the hassle of contacting everyone you know and all the places you do business with just to tell them you changed your phone number? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make an anonymous call and protect your real number?

Sometimes you want to play a joke on your friends for April Fool’s Day or even just any regular day. Think of the fun you can have by pretending to be the government tax department and making your friends think that they are in trouble and sweat. But calling them with your real number will spoil the whole joke, of course.

So how can you avoid using your real phone number and make anonymous calls then? You can get a private disposable phone number from CoverMe!

CoverMe gives you a real U.S. or Canadian phone number that you can use however you like. It is just like a real phone number and you can make and receive calls and texts from anyone, e

ven people who are not using CoverMe.

Whenever you want to make an anonymous call, get a CoverMe private number. It’s cheap, easy and disposable. You can activate it and terminate the phone number at any time.

You can have more than one CoverMe’s private numbers at a time and you can set up call forwarding, voicemail and call blocking with your private number.

Use CoverMe to Encrypt Your Phone

The sensitive, confidential data on your phone needs to be protected from hackers and voyeurs, especially if you use the phone for business. For example, a business company will encrypt their phones to protect their sensitive, confidential business data and help prevent corporate espionage. Without the encryption key, hackers will not be able to decipher the data even if they can intercept it.

If you are a regular user, you may think you don’t have any sensitive data on your phone and don’t need to encrypt your phone, but maybe you do. If your phone is stolen, the thief now has access to your e-mail account, your home address, as well as any number of personal information. If you have banking apps on your phone, the thief can even access your bank accounts and transfer out all your money.

For the regular user, CoverMe can help encrypt your phone with the personal vault, private phone number and decoy function.

CoverMe’s personal vault can hold all your important data, such as photos, contacts, documents, videos, audio recordings and passwords. CoverMe’s military-grade encryption technology protects all the important data you put in the vault and hackers will not be able to get at it.

With CoverMe’s private phone number, you can make encrypted phone calls to prevent others intercepting the call and eavesdropping. Also, calls that you make with CoverMe private phone number will never appear on your phone bill.

When you are using your phone around a lot of people and you don’t want everyone seeing your confidential data, you can use a decoy password to enter a decoy account. This account is just like a regular CoverMe account but you only put the data and contacts here that you don’t mind other people seeing.

You can even disguise the CoverMe app as an ordinary news reader app. People who see you using your phone will not notice anything out of the ordinary. It looks like you are just reading the daily news, but really you are managing your private communication and data.

The Best Mobile Android Security App

As mobile phones  become more sophisticated, we are relying on them to do more of our daily tasks – make calls and texts, store contact information, take and store photos and videos. Having so much private information on our phones make them vulnerable to voyeurs and we should use a phone security app to protect our valuable information.

CoverMe is the best phone security app available for Android devices, providing military-grade protection to ensure your text messages can only be seen by you and the recipient. The end-to-end encryption scrambles the message after you send it and can only be descrambled by the recipient.

CoverMe also gives users valuable security features to prevent others snooping information on your phone:

Shake-to-Lock

When someone walks near you while you are looking at private content, you can give your phone a quick shake and the CoverMe’s app will close and jump to home screen or the lock screen. With CoverMe’s premium version, you can even configure the lock screen to scroll through your photo album.

Intruder Alarm

If an incorrect password is entered, CoverMe will use your phone’s front facing camera to take a picture of the intruder, the time and GPS location of the break-in attempt. The information will be stored for you to check later to find out who is trying to break into your phone.

Message Security Level

Users can set 4 levels of message security to protect their text messages.

· NORMAL messages do not self-destruct and can be forwarded, copied and saved.

· PROTECTED messages do not self-destruct but cannot be forwarded and copied.

· DELETE AFTER messages will be deleted after a certain time.

· DELETE ON READ messages quickly self-destruct after being read.  

Decoy Function

When you are using your phone in public, you won’t want to expose your most confidential data. You can input a decoy password to enter a decoy account. This account is just like a real CoverMe account, but you can put content here that you don’t mind others seeing.

Advanced end-to-end encryption and these security features combine to make CoverMe the best phone security app for Android.

5 Best Secure Chat Apps

While emails are great for sending long, detailed information, it is not the best option when you need a quick response for short questions. Standard SMS messages are not secure and incur charges from your mobile carrier. To get the attention of your recipient and get a quick response, the best choice is instant messaging, but be sure to pick a secure chat app to protect your communications.

Here are 5 recommended secure chat apps:

1. CoverMe (Android, iOS) uses military-grade algorithms to encrypt messages from end-to-end. Once you send the message it will be encrypted for sending, then decrypted on the recipient’s side. You can set messages to self-destruct right after reading, after a certain time or you can remotely recall a message. A quick shake of the phone closes the app and displays the lock screen. CoverMe can be disguised as a news reader, so it will look like you are just reading the news. Secure chat group are also possible.

2. Telegram (Android, iOS, Windows) features end-to-end encryption ensuring that only you and your recipient can read the messages. Like CoverMe, Telegram lets you set a time for messages to self-destruct. Group chats with up to 200 people can be created.           

3. Wickr (Android, iOS) lets you set a time for the delivered message to be deleted. Metadata, such as the time message was sent and geo-location can be removed as well.  End-to-end encryption is provided for every message and group chats can support up to 10 people.

4. Signal Private Messenger (Android, iOS) is the only app in our list that does not require both parties have the app installed in order to encrypt messages. The app adds a layer of security over standard SMS text and picture messages, giving you the ability to send encrypted messages to anyone.

5. Gliph (Android, iOS) operates across all your devices so you can switch between the mobile phone app or the desktop computer version. The “Real Delete” feature lets you permanently delete messages from your device, your recipient’s device and their servers whenever you want.