Identity theft happens when someone uses another person’s identity or personal information, such as their name, social security number, credit card number or online credentials without permission to commit a crime or fraud. Resolving identity theft is not easy. Once information gets exposed, it can stay out there for years. The majority of identity theft incidents originate from cyber criminals exploiting users’ weak passwords. It is important to be the first to know if your personal information is exposed online so that you can take control of your online identity and minimise the risk of account takeover.
F‑Secure ID PROTECTION helps you protect your personal information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card numbers by alerting you of any breached online services when your personal information has been found as part of a data breach or data leak. The app then gives you specific instructions on how to recover from the incident with minimum damage. It also protects your identity by offering a secure storage for all your passwords and by acting as an easy-to-use password manager and you get to improve your security by creating strong and unique passwords. By being able to synchronise the passwords across all of your devices, it also makes the management of your security a lot easier.
Once you’ve installed F-Secure ID PROTECTION and you start the application for the first time, the app asks you to create a hard-to-guess master password that you can remember as the app is not able to reset your master password. The fact that the app cannot reset the master password has been a conscious decision by F-Secure to increase your security and privacy and protect your data. The data stored in the app is encrypted and decrypted only on your own device. Every time you enter your ID PROTECTION master password, this password adds another layer of encryption as it is used to generate an encryption key that descrambles your encrypted ID PROTECTION data. This process is carried out by using the PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function 2) standard, which adds a salt (random data) value to the password and hashes the resulting data with the HMAC-SHA256 function. This process gets repeated 20 000 times. Your master password and the master encryption key are never stored anywhere and the encryption keys exist only when you use the product. When you turn off F-Secure ID PROTECTION, the encryption key is destroyed and there is no way of decrypting any information that you have saved in F-Secure ID PROTECTION. This level of security also means that there is no way for F-Secure to recover your password or data for you if you forget the master password. Furthermore, F-Secure does not track you when you synchronise your data across devices.
F-Secure ID PROTECTION stores and protects your personal information, such as passwords, credit card numbers and PIN codes and the app gives you an easy way to make sure that the account credentials for your online services, as well as your credit card details and other important information, stay both safe and conveniently accessible. It is possible to generate stronger, unique passwords for all your services and accounts and the passwords can automatically be entered on login pages in your Web browser to make it easier and quicker to access your account (not available on iOS versions). For security reasons, access to passwords is not made available through F-Secure servers and it is recommended that you sync your passwords with another device running the ID PROTECTION app, just in case you lose or break your device. No matter what happens to one of your devices, the sync feature ensures that you will always have access to your passwords on the other devices.