In a recent interview with SafetyDetectives, Aviv Cohen, CEO of ShieldApps, discussed the company’s unique approach to consumer cybersecurity. Established a decade ago, ShieldApps focuses on ‘cyber privacy,’ offering a comprehensive suite that proactively prevents personal information tracking. Unlike many enterprise-centric solutions, ShieldApps caters to technically non-savvy users, providing automated protection against identity theft. Cohen emphasizes the challenge of balancing robust protection with a seamless user experience. He also addresses the impact of remote work and cloud services on cybersecurity, highlighting both opportunities and risks in these evolving trends.
Can you talk about your journey and how you arrived at ShieldApps?
ShieldApps was founded ~10 years ago, after thorough research of the consumer security and performance software landscape and the realization that there were holes in that market, and a disservice to consumers, in the shape of misleading products, under-performing software, prioritization of corporate solutions vs consumer solutions etc.
We have decided to develop and produce consumer-oriented software products that would both be better from a technical perspective, as well as straight forward and simple to use. We wanted to make sophisticated technology easily usable and readily available to consumers worldwide.
As the years went by, we have identified a specific void in the consumer market in all regards to protecting one’s privacy on his/her devices, and our focus has shifted towards ‘cyber privacy’.
Since then, ShieldApps has focused on this niche, developing the most comprehensive software suite dedicated to protecting consumer privacy and minimizing the risk of Identity Theft before it happens (as opposed to known solutions out there such as Experian, Lifelock etc’, our products proactively prevent your device-based personal information from being ‘seen’ and tracked by third parties and potentially abused)
What makes ShieldApps stand out in a competitive cybersecurity market?
The cyber security market is mostly focused on enterprise and corporate solutions. The known consumer solutions are very limited, and are mostly insurance policy of sorts, in the sense that they compensate the consumer after he/she have been affected by data breach/leak, identity theft etc’. there are also consumer cyber security products of course, but those are mostly one-trick-ponies in the sense that they protect a very specific concern rather than looking at the wider picture. ShieldApps’ solution is geared towards the technically non-savvy user, and allows for an almost fully automated protection of the user’s information on their device.
Our solution is readily available on our site, but at the same time can be white labeled by corporates/enterprises and others, and thus provided to their customers under their branding.
What are the biggest cybersecurity and privacy challenges facing businesses and individuals today?
It is widely known that the more advanced the protection measures, the more advanced the malicious attempts are. Whatever can be automated, is easier to protect in that sense, but what you cannot always control is the human element. And that’s were we come in; our software, when installed on the consumer/employee device, will prevent them from leaving the relevant sensitive information (such as login credentials, sensitive documents etc) potentially abusable, will prevent eavesdropping, hacking into their cameras, tracking their online activity, and so on.
There is a challenge in finding the ‘sweet spot’ in which you are protecting sensitive information, preventing tracking and hacking on one hand, but not handicapping the user experience on the other – and I believe our solution is exactly in that spot as much as it can be, and allows a smooth, yet safe experience.
Why should individuals and organizations consider using a VPN for their online activities?
VPNs essentially (if they are doing their job right and are used properly) anonymize your online activity in different ways. As much as that’s needed, there are multiple other elements and layers of cyber privacy that need to be protected – hence our Cyber Privacy Suite, which has a built in VPN, but way more than that, to try and maximize the user privacy and protection.
Other than a VPN, what are some best practices for safeguarding personal information and data privacy?
The key ‘to-do’ items are:
- Use variable and sophisticated passwords.
- Do not save your passwords online- keep them in a local password manager.
- Encrypt your sensitive documents on your device, do not leave them unprotected.
- Use an up-to-date antivirus.
- Block your webcam.
- Block your microphone.
- Block any tracking attempt on your device. Some tracking is ‘legitimate’ and is meant to improve your browsing (via targeted ads etc) – and some is potentially malicious.
How have remote work and the shift to cloud services impacted cybersecurity requirements and challenges?
So these are affecting the security outcome in opposite directions:
- Working remotely opens up multiple ‘risk gateways’ if the end user does not follow proper security protocols. Being at home with a work-computer basically exposes the device to non-work elements (unless properly locked down by the employer), and even worse, if the employee uses his/her personal device, that could open quite a Pandora’s Box 😊
- Using cloud services places allot of the risk ‘outside’ the local device, thus puts the safety of that data on the remote service provider, which usually does well – but again, accessing that service from a less-secured device can be just as damaging and risky in that sense.